Cleaning Vinyl seats

 Recently I have been feeling a bit of shame as to the state of my upholstery in the boat. It had that brown tinge like I thought it had been badly sun affected and would need to be replaced. The reason I thought it was the sun was because it was worse on the top of the seats and coaming pads.

I got some quotes and just to do have one seat re-upholstered ranged between $250 and $350 and that doesn't include the foam! I had a crack at recovering the worst cushion myself and while it is slightly better than the ripped cushion it replaced, it doesn't look professional. Needless to say it wasn't good enough to warrant doing the rest of the seats myself.

At this point I put it out of my mind as I can't afford to re-upholster all the vinyl in the boat.

Then I happened on a youtube link today that showed some decent looking vinyl getting the detailer treatment and it looked even better. The 'secret' ingredient was high concentrate degreaser. So off I went to supercheap and bought a $12 bottle of degreaser (don't buy the stuff in spray cans), a spray bottle and some microfibre cloths and set to work this afternoon. I diluted the concentrate about 5 to 1 and as soon as you spray it on, scrub it with the little microfibre pad I bought and then wipe it clean, it looks miles better and is now all the same colour. It took about 30 minutes to do the whole boat (remember it is a dual console so has seating and coaming pads in the bow as well).

It isn't the same as re-upholstering the boat but it has removed 90% of my shame! I can't believe the seats were basically just dirty and not sunburnt, well about 10% sunburnt. I can live with that for now.