Someone in the past re-dyed my Dark Saddle Interior to Black. I want to return it to the original color and re-use the original parts since they appear to be in very good physical condition, except for the peeling paint. I did not want to risk a second coat of dye on top of the first for fear of three issues: the crevices being filled with paint, poor adhesion of layer one causing more flaking later, and black showing thru the brown if it flaked. I do want to re-dye in Dark Saddle to get a consistent interior color anyway.

I experimented with several different chemical strippers on a test piece and had very poor results. Lacquer thinner, acetone, and brake cleaner were all suggested on old posts, but being a chemist, they seemed way too aggressive to me and may damage the underlying vinyl or smear and remove the grain pattern. I didn't want to risk those three strong solvents, so I didn't even test them. My local Corvette shop, Corvette Paramedics, suggested low pressure glass media blasting. I ran a few pieces today and the results came out very well. Just a little bit of texture remains to the surface which should smooth out after cleaning and re-dying. The original Vinyl Grain Pattern is not damaged, and the glass media even got into the crevices and removed the dye. The crevices actually deepened with the dye removal.

I did four panels today. It's a slow process but it works. We believed it was black spray paint in the beginning because of the wide variety of spots that were flaking. However I now believe it was SEM Dye because it adheared much more strongly than paint does in most places, so the places where it flaked off or were removed easily easily were probably just bad surface preparation. It did take about 4 times as long as removing paint from a typical metal surface, it really did stick very well in most places. It would not just "blow off" except in a couple spots, or the back side. Each small Halo panel took about 45 minutes. The seat back was a different material (fiberglass without vinyl covering) and the SEM did just blow-off of that. Here's my test run after 4 hours of work: I guess I will be able to go back to Dark Saddle after all! Yay!


Typical random flaking due to poor surface prep

Test One fine glass media

Grain close-up

Four panels in 3 1/2 hours without any damage!

 

That looks like it is working great and you should get good paint adhesion