Effects of Leather Conditioners on Leather and Adhesives

[chefwong]

IME, all leather dashboards fail.....eventually .
I'm considering buying out the lease on our current, as I simply just hate the whole (all screen and no button) approach

Has anyone read any issues about potential of over conditioning of leathered or the negative effects it may have to the adhesives underneath.
IME/IMO, when the leather dashboards fail (it's not necessarily due to dry leather or possibly it is) but it's more the adhesion of it that fails over time.
Before putting my technical Hat on, I dunno if it's due to the expansion/contraction of the leather, the adhesive and the substrate below....

 

[Desertnate]

I've never owned a car with a leather dash, but from what I've read about several cars that have had them, the failure is due to exposure to the sun. It dries out the leather and cooks the adhesives/foam underneath. Not long ago I was looking at a couple cars with optional leather dashes and wanted to know what I might be getting into.

I can't imagine any leather product penetrating clear to the adhesives in the dash unless you're pouring the liquid on there and letting it seep in. If anything, good leather care should slow down the drying/cracking/aging from the sun. The more pliable and soft it is, the better able it should be to expand and contract with temperature changes. That doesn't help with the glue and the foam underneath the leather, but at least the top layer stays in shape.

If you don't have one already, I'd get a good sun shade and use it religiously everytime the car is parked outdoors to give that dash an extra layer of defense.

 

[chefwong]

We generally do use a SS in the warmer months if we go about and it's parked .
Even with -ceramic high performance tint-, the SS is KING.
Most people don't understand that the tint alleviate the issue on a moving vehicle where it sheds it.
Sun Soak is Sun soak.

While I'm sure without a SS during the warmer months plays a huge role, I've see delam failures on all types - even garage queens.

When I was typing the post, I was thinking on the premise that maybe - without doing the WIKI dive on it, what is the expansion/contracton rate of vinyl vs. leather. I wasn't thinking about hard/softer leather but more the material itself and what was it's general *expansion/contraction* rate as a while - relative to the glue and substrate.

 

[Desertnate]

From that standpoint (and not a bad one), it is probably more of a question of the methods and quality of the materials used in the construction and whether leather is suitable at all for anything other than a museum piece your that is only driven on rare occasions. I'd say it has nothing to do with what leather care products are used.

Most traditional dashes are a hard plastic or a soft touch foam dipped in liquid vinyl. I'm just guessing those hold up far better because they are formed as one piece when manufactured and not like a leather dash where an animal hide is glued to another surface. That creates layers of materials with different contraction/expansion rates, different rates of aging/hardening etc. If you start bonding layers of dissimalr materials together, you will have a lot more points of potential failure.