Colour kits by COLOURLOCK

Colour kits by COLOURLOCK bring the factory shade back into your leather

What are COLOURLOCK's colour kits? Complete packs for refreshing colour: cleaner, water-based tint, sealant and application tools in one matched box. Designed for pigmented smooth leather on the steering wheel, seat bolster and gear knob, and for fabric convertible roofs. From a size for a single worn spot to a litre for whole interiors.

Colour kits by COLOURLOCK are complete packs for refreshing the colour of leather and fabric roofs. They bundle cleaner, tint, sealant and tools into one box instead of leaving you to hunt down the right individual bottles yourself. At the core is the water-based polyurethane tint, which settles into the leather surface as a flexible colour film rather than sitting on top like paint. The brand comes from leather restoration, as Lederzentrum since 1995, and is now part of Koch-Chemie.

• The whole chain comes in one box. Colour alone won't last. Without cleaning, degreasing and a final sealant, even the best tint wears off at the grip point within a few weeks. The kits supply these steps in the right order, including sponge and gloves. How you'll notice: you're not reordering anything while the first coat is already drying.
• Water-based tint, not a second coat of paint. Leather Fresh is a polyurethane dispersion, i.e. flexible plastic particles floating in water. Under warm air from a hairdryer, the water evaporates, the particles fuse and settle into the leather grain as a wafer-thin second skin. What that means for you: no hardener, no pot life, no solvent fumes in the cabin, and the seat still feels like leather.
• The factory shade comes from the colour database. F034 Black matches the typical blacks of the German premium brands with no mixing. COLOURLOCK mixes other shades from the neutral base, for many models even by the stored factory code. In everyday terms: from a metre away, the recoloured seat bolster no longer stands out.

Detailing1's tip from the shop: The step where most dye jobs fail is degreasing. We regularly get enquiries from customers whose steering wheel is bare again at exactly the grip point after four to six weeks. It was cleaned, not degreased. Used smooth leather carries a film of skin oils, old care milks and silicones that a mild leather cleaner won't shift. So after cleaning, keep going with cleaning spirit or degreaser until the surface turns visibly dull and feels slightly tacky under your finger. The check takes ten seconds: press on a strip of tape and rip it off. If colour stays on the strip, that spot needs an adhesion promoter first, not tint.

When recolouring leather, it's rarely the colour that fails

If you recolour a worn seat bolster, you almost never lose the result because of the tint; you lose it because of a step you skipped before it.

COLOURLOCK has seen this from the other side since 1995. The brand was born at Lederzentrum, a specialist in leather repair and leather dyes, and has supplied upholsterers and detailers ever since who fill cracks, re-emboss grain and rebuild colour. If you do that work every day, you know the tin of colour is the least critical part. The critical parts are cleaning, degreasing, film thickness and the sealant afterwards.

Care and colour are two different jobs, even though both types of kit sit side by side in the range. A care kit keeps the existing top coat supple and colourfast. A colour kit comes in when that layer has already worn through in one spot. How you'll tell: as long as the area just looks dull, care is enough. As soon as the leather at the grip point shows through lighter than next to it, colour is due.

That order is hard-wired into the colour kits. A kit contains everything that lies between the faded current state and the fresh colour: a matched cleaner, the water-based tint, the application sponge, gloves and, depending on size, the sealant. You no longer decide which cleaner goes with the colour, only how big the damage is.

Day-to-day at Detailing1, that's the most common reason customers reach for a kit after a first failed attempt. The first go was with a colour from the DIY store and an all-purpose cleaner off the shelf, and the result lasted one summer. Not because the colour was bad, but because nobody had planned the degreasing between cleaner and colour. You can see where the kits sit in the overall range one level up under Back to Sets from COLOURLOCK.

Leather Fresh colours leather, Soft Top Fresh colours roofs

The colour kits split into two families, and the dividing line isn't price but two completely different surfaces.

The Leather Fresh kits by COLOURLOCK work on pigmented smooth leather, i.e. leather with a factory polyurethane-based top coat. The tint takes there because it's chemically the same as the finish the factory applied: a flexible polymer film that bonds with the existing layer. Steering wheel, entry bolster, side bolster and gear knob are the classic areas.

The Complete dye kits by COLOURLOCK go a step further and cover the whole build-up. The COLOURLOCK "Cabrio Colour Set" is the special case among them: four matched components for fabric roofs, namely Pol Star as a deep cleaner, the pigmented Soft Top Fresh, Crosslinker CD as the crosslinker and the water-based Allround Textile Sealant to finish. Available in Graubraun Dunkel (Grey Brown Dark), Grünschwarz (Green Black), Schwarz (Black), Schwarzblau (Black Blue) and Anthrazit (Anthracite).

What both families include is the tools. Application sponges, gloves and, depending on size, a brush or cloth come in the box, because application quality depends on the tool: a coarse sponge pulls air bubbles into the fresh tint, and too soft a cloth lifts the layer off again when you go back over it. With the roof, colour and crosslinker also have to be mixed in a fixed ratio, and the kit sets that dose for you.

Why two families and not one all-purpose product? Leather has a closed top coat; roof fabric is an open weave. On leather, the colour should sit on top and fuse with the finish; in fabric, it has to wrap around every single fibre and anchor there. That's why the roof kit includes a crosslinker that chemically locks the pigments into the fibre.

The leather tint, on the other hand, needs no hardener at all. Mix the two routes up, and you'll either get a stiff roof fabric or a colour that washes out again in the first downpour.

The damage sets the kit size, not the car

The sizes differ in the amount of tint, not in the formula. So what matters is the area that actually needs colour.

For a single worn spot, the COLOURLOCK "Leather Fresh Set XS" is enough: 100 ml of tint in F034 Black, a fine-pored application sponge, two nitrile gloves. The material covers a complete steering wheel or two heavily worn seat bolsters on the same car. That's the typical scope of a smart repair on your own car.

If you've got several cars or a complete interior ahead of you, the COLOURLOCK "Leather Fresh Set XL" works out more economical. One litre of tint is enough for six to ten interiors in the same colour, plus cleaning and application sponges and gloves. The real advantage for commercial use is the batch: one container gives you the same shade for weeks, with no mixing tolerance between two bottles.

The COLOURLOCK "Leather Fresh C & P Set" takes a third route and packs the whole process into one box: Mild leather cleaner for pre-cleaning, the Leather Fresh tint and the Leather Protector with vitamin E and UV filter to finish. It comes as Neutral for tinting to your own shade and as Black for the standard case.

We often see customers order by car size rather than by damaged area, and then end up with a litre of tint on the shelf for a single steering wheel. Roughly measure beforehand how many palm-sized areas really need colour. In most interiors it's two or three, not the whole seat.

Thin coats and heat make the colour last

The tint is dabbed on, not brushed. Brushing leaves streaks, because the sponge lifts the still-wet layer again and spreads it unevenly.

The process on leather is always the same: clean, degrease until dull, gently level raised fibres on the bolster with a sanding pad, then dab on three to five wafer-thin coats from seam to seam. Each coat gets 60 to 90 seconds of warm air before the next one goes on. That heat isn't a drying accelerator; it's the actual crosslinking step: only once the water has gone do the polymer particles fuse into a closed film. In plain terms: cut the hairdryer breaks short and you build several loose coats on top of each other instead of one solid one.

Then comes the test of patience. The fresh colour needs around 24 hours to off-gas before the sealant can go on. Only then does a product from Leather sealant by COLOURLOCK go over it to shield the colour against denim abrasion and sun. Without that final step, the tint is finished but unprotected, and the grip point starts all over again.

The first time, allow more time than any instructions say. A steering wheel takes 60 to 90 minutes with cleaning, degreasing, three coats and the hairdryer breaks; by the third wheel it's a good half of that. The difference isn't skill; it's that at the start you check after every step whether the result is right. That's exactly what you should do, and the extra time comes with it.

On the roof, the process works differently and takes planning. After deep cleaning, the foam test has to come up clean: rub the flat of your hand hard over the rinsed, wet fabric. If white foam appears, there's still surfactant in the weave, and later that acts as a release agent under the colour.

After that, clear coat, glass and polycarbonate are masked off completely, and colour and crosslinker are mixed in two batches, because the pot life runs out after two to four hours. It cures for 24 hours at 10 to 40 degrees with no rain. So a dry weekend is the real requirement, not the tools.

Colour kits colour the surface; they don't fill cracks

A tint lays a wafer-thin layer over the existing surface. Whatever is missing underneath stays visible, and that's exactly where the colour kits' scope ends.

Deep cracks, split edges and worn-away grain are jobs for the build-up underneath, not for colour. For those, there are fillers, grain paste and adhesives under Repair by COLOURLOCK. The order is non-negotiable: fill and sand first, then colour. Put colour over a crack and you've got a coloured crack.

The second hard limit is the type of leather. All the leather colour kits assume a pigmented top coat. Open-pored aniline, nubuck, suede and Alcantara don't have that layer; there the tint would soak in as a stain instead of sitting as a film. The test takes a minute: if a drop of water beads on an inconspicuous spot, the leather is coated. If it soaks in and darkens, the area belongs to the open-pored camp, and the route goes via the nubuck base in Colour refresher by COLOURLOCK.

In our experience, the third limit comes up least often and is the most annoying: colour matching. We recoloured a twelve-year-old seat with the factory black that matched exactly according to the database, and the fresh area still came out visibly darker than the rest. The reason isn't the colour but the surrounding leather, which a decade of UV light had lightened.

The honest takeaway: on heavily faded areas, colour the whole part up to the next seam, not just the patch. On the roof, the same principle applies with different limits. Vinyl roofs, polycarbonate windows and fabric whose fibres have already worn through don't belong under colour.

Which colour kit suits your damage

The fastest way to a decision is two questions: what surface are you dealing with, and how big is the area that really needs colour?

A single worn spot on pigmented smooth leather, i.e. steering wheel, side bolster or gear knob, is a job for the COLOURLOCK "Leather Fresh Set XS". If you want to work through cleaning, colour and protection in one go without putting the pieces together yourself, take the COLOURLOCK "Leather Fresh C & P Set". For several cars or a complete interior in the same colour, the COLOURLOCK "Leather Fresh Set XL" pays off.

A faded fabric roof is a case of its own and needs the COLOURLOCK "Cabrio Colour Set" in the right shade. And if you're only missing one piece of the kit because cleaner and sealant are already on the shelf, go the individual route: the neutral bases and the nubuck version are under Colour refresher by COLOURLOCK, and the right cleaner to go before them under Leather cleaner by COLOURLOCK.

The thought that sits above it all: a colour kit doesn't replace an upholsterer; it pushes back the point at which you need one. The polished-bare spot on the steering wheel rim is the moment when the top coat is still there and only the colour has gone. That's when the repair costs a weekend and a kit. Once the finish has worn through and bare leather is showing, you're no longer recolouring; you're having it re-trimmed.