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Well the Toronado is now safely locked away in winter storage in an off site facility. So the best I can do is sit here and ponder about the things i would like to get done next summer and maybe start up a whole new thread that we can chat away on during the long dreary winter months.
As you may recall from an earlier thread I had the body work done and the car repainted last fall and then had some issues with the engine that were finally resolved with a carb rebuild, major tune-up and replacing all the vacuum lines. So now it looks good on the outside and runs good so now i can start thinking about some of the other cosmetic things i would like to do.
The first thing that comes to mind is giving the interior a major cleaning. These mid 70's Toronado's as you know had that nice cloth/velour interior and I am trying to decide what is the best way to clean it to get rid of some if not most of the 40+ years of dirt and grime that has built up on it.
My first thought was to go to the rental place and rent one of those carpet/upholstery cleaners and on a nice warm sunny day pulling out all the seats and giving them all a good cleaning and let the warm sun dry them out. The other benefit to this approach is that it gives me clear access to the carpets (which are a real mess) and try to give them a good cleaning as well. The question(s) are what cleaner works best on carpet and upholstery and is this method any good.
The alternative is to purchase an inexpensive steam cleaner and have a go at it with that. Is this a better way with less water being used on the material which i am concerned could lead to the material matting a bit.
The third option is to take it to a detailing place but most of them use copious amounts of water and soap and clean with the seating still in the car, which can take forever to dry out and depending on how much water they use on the carpets can soak thru to the underpad and we all know what that can lead to.
So does anyone have any thoughts on the best method self clean or commercial shop and just as important what are the best products to use for this cleaning.
Byron,
Your car does indeed look wonderful with its new coat of paint.
Work and family seemed to combine to kick my butt this year, so I didn't have the time to spend on the cars, or even keeping up with this forum. By the time I saw your posts about your engine and carb issues, others had already chimed in with the right information. I was following and rooting you on from afar - and two weeks behind!
I don't have an answer for your cleaning questions, but I need to know the same information. I have the seats and carpet out of my Dad's car, waiting to be cleaned, prior to swapping them into my car. I can't decide on what to do, either.
If you do pull them out of the car, be prepared. Those seats are ridiculously heavy. All of the motor and transmission stuff on the bottom adds quite a bit of heft.
I have removed the seats on three old cars I have owned, a '64 Jetstar 88 two-door hardtop, a '73 Custom Cruiser wagon, and a '75 Delta 88 convertible. In all three cases it was so both the seats themselves could be taken to an upholstery shop for recovering and so I could replace the carpet in each. Getting the seats out is not difficult but not trivial, and doing it on the convertible was by far the easiest because there's no roof in the way as you and a friend are trying to heft the thing out of the car.
In my experience, I would NOT remove the seats if the only reason is to clean them and clean the carpet. It's not worth the effort. You can get at the seats just fine while they're sitting in the car, and I would do lots of vacuuming and scrubbing of the carpet before I concluded that I could actually do a better job if the seats weren't there. I doubt I would ever conclude that.
Remember a few things here. First, as 77Toro notes, these seats are HEAVY. Don't underestimate the effort it will take to get them out and how many axes you may have to rotate them on while you and a friend are holding them in your hands to be able to fit them through the door openings and get them fully out of the car. Second, the carpet, if original, is 40+ years old. It's not going to look perfect no matter how much it's cleaned and vacuumed. One of my favorite sayings in old car restoration is "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good." If you want the carpet to look like new, then by all means take out the seats and put in new carpeting. As I said, I've done that three times, and in all of those cases, the carpet wasn't just dirty but was worn through in places, so there was no alternative to replacement. But, otherwise, first see if you can make the carpet look half-way decent by cleaning it in situ. The result might be good enough. Ditto for the seats.
Here's the front seat area of my '78. The seats are leather and have cracks, but I'm not going to have them recovered any time soon as they're not that bad, and I like the fact that they're original. I've never done anything more to them than wipe with a damp rag.
The carpeting is also original and is pretty good. I've not done anything to it except vacuum it regularly.
Thanks guys for the heads up on how heavy the seats are and how awkward they are to get in and out. It was not a job I was really looking forward to doing. The rear seat should be fairly simple at least getting the bottom out for cleaning. I am hoping the rear seat back will be almost as easy.
I once had a 72 Cadillac Eldorado and getting the rear seat bottom out was not a big deal and was something I could handle on my own. The problem on that car was the rear seat back. Unlike many GM cars where the rear seat back was fastened with 2 bolts kind of centered, on the Eldorado the rear seat back bolts were intregated with the rear seat belt hold down/retract mechanism and that was a real pain in the butt to remove. I am hoping the Toronado is not the same. in which case it will get cleaned in place.
I am hoping that one of those rental cleaners will do the job in cleaning not only the the carpet but the seats as well. I know they work well on household carpets but will they do a good job on upholstery. With the seats being powder blue the dirt is fairly obvious especially around the buttons on the seats. My wife won't ride in the car unless I put a towel down for here to sit on. And if I go out for a drive on my own - without a towel down - when I get home she won't let me sit on our furniture because I might transfer the dirt from jeans to her clean couch - lol! My concern is how will this cleaner work on the velour cloth material. Will it cause matting and if so is there some other process that works better on this type of upholstery material. Still researching that one. Have watched more you tubes on the subject than I care to count and am no farther ahead.
Jaunty my carpet is nowhere near as nice as yours. It is really and I mean really filthy. It has a number of very dirty black (grease?) stains that may never come out completely even with multiple cleanings. Fortunately there are no holes or wear thru and I would prefer not to spend $500 to replace the carpet. I would rather just get it reasonably clean and then get a one piece floor mat for the front to help maintain it going forward.
So the search continues for the best cleaning products and process to use. If anyone has anyone suggestions would appreciate hearing about them.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to All Oldsmobile Fanatics!
$500 for a carpet? Wow. When I last needed carpet, for the '73 Custom Cruiser, I bought it from this place. Very good place to deal with. They've got carpet for a '77 Toronado for about $140. I know that there's shipping to Canada and exchange rate and all that, but I still have to believe you can get this for less than half of $500. It's at least worth a call if you're seriously looking for carpet.
I know many people swear by Legendary Interiors and SMS Auto Fabrics, but they're certainly not the only two games in town. This company is in Ohio.
I have had good results with spray Oxi Clean on most any kind of fabric seats. No bleach, which is good but it does get most stains out and it also works well on vinyl.That would be my first choice. On leather I use Barrett Jackson leather cleaner & conditioner, works well on old cracked dried out seats.. Just my experience yours may differ......Tedd
I appreciate the personal use history. I really don't want to screw up the metallic gold disco zebra striped awesomeness by having to do random trial and error.
That is what my interior is like as well, only mine is powder blue. Here a few pictures that give you an idea of what it looks like. In the pictures it looks a whole lot cleaner than it really is. Even the carpet looks better in the picture that it actually is but if you look real close on the drivers side photo you will see the big black stain just above the door sill plate. The picture also shows some of my other projects for next summer. One is to repair and replace the broken turn indicator arm and hopefully get the cruise control wired back up. The second is to replace the broken emergency brake handle and get rid of the blue electrical mar connector that is currently acting as the emergency brake handle. Although they were missing when I took this picture, I did manage to track down and install the seat belt shoulder retainer clips but all I could get were black ones, so need to look at ways of getting them painted to kind of match the interior.
The car I bought had flawless carpet ... except for the GIANT hole outboard of the heel pad that resulted from some water seepage issue. My Dad's car always had the full length factory rubber floor mats in it. Underneath was beautiful, but the areas on the sides, like your black mark, seemed to be threadbare, sold, hard, black tar and stains. That is, until I took a good shop vac to them. I scraped and scraped at those black areas with the show vac nozzle - and suddenly, a little bit of the years of super compressed dirt came loose, and a few twigs of brown carpet fiber poked up!!!
A few hours of work with the shop vac completely eliminated those spots. Several of the other "stains" went away in the same manner. I pulled the carpet and have it in the house. I'm still debating on the best way to go to truly clean it - hence, my joy when you started this discussion!!
I'm not an OEM only fanatic - but every set of replacement carpet I saw online didn't have the ribbed heel pad like the factory one does. If I didn't have a good donor, I would live with the solid heel pad and never look back, but dang, it just jumps out at me as not being GM.
Thanks for sharing the pictures of your interior. These helped kick in my OCD (with a capital "O" for "Oldsmobile") for the day.
You have two stellar things going for you with your vinyl top - you still have the windlace between the chrome trim and the vinyl top, plus you still have the plastic (don't look at me wrong, or I will break into many pieces) trim around the opera windows!
One further observation for commiseration - why do our door strap anchor covers have to turn green? I suspected UV to be the culprit, but some that have been in direct sun light for years are still dark woodgrain, while others that spent their lives in the shade on a car port turned green. My adult daughter always thought they were supposed to be green on my Dad's car when she would ride with him!
On a related interior note, I have those factory Oldsmobile full length floor mats stretched out on the hood of another car in my garage. I'm still trying to figure out how to clean, uncrease, and repair a few small tears on them - without accidentally destroying them.
77Toronado so glad I was able to help with your motivation.
I have vacuumed the carpet a few times and basically removed the sandy beach that was there but obviously it needs more work with the shop vac. I will give it a real good going over in the spring when the car comes out of storage using your method. At this point I am inclined to go to the local rental place and rent one of those professional grade carpet/upholstery cleaners that shampoos and vacuums up the mess all in one go. Fingers crossed that it does a good enough job to make me happy. Really don't want to drop a pile of money on new carpet and the effort involved does not really appeal to me either. Hopefully I can get it reasonably clean around the edges and then I will get a one piece mat to protect the carpet.
Funny you should mention the windlace under the trim on the roof and the fragile vinyl trim around the opera windows. I have been looking for replacements for those items for quite a while with absolutely no luck. I can live with windlace under the chrome trim but would really like to do something about the trim around the opera windows. I have been to a dozen trim shops to see if they had anything that would work but no luck there either.
I know what you mean about the anchor covers going green. Every Toronado seems to have the same problem. I got a set of anchor covers from John (2blu442) from the 78 he is parting out. They are cloth covered. I was thinking of recovering them in a powder blue material and swapping them in to replace my now green woodgrain covers. But I am also wondering about whether it is possible to recover the existing pieces with woodgrain vinyl. It is available from MacTac, 3M and Oracal. Any vinyl sign or supply shop should be able to supply it by the yard. In fact I see it is available from Home Depot and Lowes. It won't be a perfect match to what is on there but if goes on ok then it should not be a big deal to cover other parts of the interior with the same material. And the material is very thin 2-3 mil thick and easy to apply.
On your full length mats I would suggest you bring them inside or into a warm environment. A hair dryer combined with a little stretching/pulling/weighting down may help with the creases. Once you get the mat warm and the wrinkles/creases out shock it with cold water to see if it holds. For the tears the only thing I can think of is to apply good foil tape on the backside of the mat. As for cleaning any good vinyl cleaner should help. It wont look new but at least it will be clean.
December 14th, 2018, 12:04 PM
