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Old Feb 19th, 2021, 16:30   #79
142 Guy
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Last Online: Apr 27th, 2024 15:46
Join Date: Jul 2020
Location: Saskatchewan, Canada
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Your carpet cleaning appears to have come out well. Those appear to be the same brown carpets as I have in my 1971 142 E. I cleaned mine using one of those commercial hot water carpet cleaners and it took either 3 or 4 cleaning treatments before dirt stopped showing up in the cleaner's catch tank (40 + years accumulation). Your carpets appear to be in better condition than mine. My underlay ended up in the garbage can; but, the carpets were in remarkably good condition.

After cleaning I has some fading along the sides of the tunnel. I also had some burn marks as a previous owner of the car appeared to be a vigorous smoker (circular burn marks around the window winder crank, burn marks from missing the ash tray, burn marks on the driver seat cushion between the legs .....). The burn marks on the carpet were mostly on the driver's side just in front of the seat so not highly visible. They were just superficial so I re-fuzzed them by applying a little glue to the bald spots and sprinkling on some long fiber flock in a close color. Not perfect; but, better than before and largely hidden by my floor mats. To deal with the fading and try to color match my patch job better, I purchased several bottles of dark brown Rit fabric dye, put the carpets into a large heavy duty contractors garbage bag, dumped 3 or 4 gallons of hot water premixed with the Rit into the bag with the carpets, sealed them up and let them soak where they were exposed to the sun to keep the bags warm. I rotated them every 30 minutes or so to agitate the mixture. Following the dye job I did have to retape the seams in the carpet because I removed all the original binding materials in order to get the carpets to lay flat in the garbage bag.

The dye job turned out better than I had expected. It is probably a touch darker than the previous color; but, that was in comparison to the 'before' condition which was faded. More importantly the carpet is now uniform in color. The Rit also turned out to be colorfast on the carpet. After recommissioning my car following restoration, it was put into storage for the winter. During storage, the rubber on my brand new heater hoses relaxed under the clamps at the back of the heater allowing about 2 l of coolant to slowly drain into the driver side footwell. In order to clean out this sticky mess I had to remove the carpets and use a hot water carpet cleaner to get the coolant out of the carpets. The color of the waste water in the catch tank ended up pale green indicating that there was no obvious wash out of the dye.

As a related footnote for anybody replacing their coolant hoses, recheck your hose clamps about 1 month after replacement of the hoses. The rubber in use on a lot of the aftermarket hoses deforms under the pressure of the clamp resulting in loss of clamping pressure and sealing. Just about all the connections on my new rad and heater hoses developed oozing coolant leaks.
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