Club 80-90 Forums

Working on cleaning and restoring/repairing rear cupboard from my Autosleeper.
The film faced plywood has faded where the sun has hit it over the years/

Any suggestions on restoring it ? I was thinking of recovering with sticky backed plastic but it won't really match up with the rest of the fittings.

Hi,l used a cloth with a bit of saddolin mahogany wood stain on and gave all the woodwork/sticky back plastic a rub over,you can vary the depth of colour by adding or reducing the amount of stain you leave on the surface,it's fresheners it all and can be reapplied to areas that wear like the bed base supports.

I tried self adhesive vinyl as a temporary fix but it shrank, bubbled and started to peel away where the sections were exposed to sunlight, didn't last for even one summer! Vinyl, cheap to try but better off staining as suggested if your kitchen units use wood veneer, If they use plastic veneer then staining will not work as well.

lodgey62 wrote:Hi,l used a cloth with a bit of saddolin mahogany wood stain on and gave all the woodwork/sticky back plastic a rub over,you can vary the depth of colour by adding or reducing the amount of stain you leave on the surface,it's fresheners it all and can be reapplied to areas that wear like the bed base supports.

I will try that on a discreet area of the plastic, thanks. All the wood I am going to sand, stain and matt varnish

islandboy wrote: I will try that on a discreet area of the plastic, thanks. All the wood I am going to sand, stain and matt varnish

I'd be interested to see the results once you've had a go, as I have similar sun fade on my unit.

^ Me too.

It's apparently "Light European Oak" according to Autosleeper. I bought three rolls of vinyl from different suppliers but none of them matched either grain or colour.

Used Blackfriar's Rosewood wood stain.
Wood trim came up lovely. Colour slightly improved on vinyl but it isn't really porous to absorb the stain.

What do you think ? Before and after pics.

Hi,
Any form of stain, on it's own or contained in paint, will only sit on the surface 'cos the vinyl is not porous. Paints, and stains, need to penetrate to a certain extent. If the vinyl is faded it's faded. I had the same problem and found that after lots of experimenting and time the only answer was to remove and recover. The difficult part was cutting the vinyl to size so that there were no gaps between it and the timber lipping. I did consider removing the timber trim at one point but as it's glued and pinned it was not going to come off whole and I had not got time to make more.
If you do recover, remove existing vinyl, hot air gun helps, clean off the old adhesive (white spirit) sand down and give 2 coats of polyurethane, first one thinned, 25% white spirit. The paint will enable you to lift and adjust the 'sticky backed' plastic. Buy quality vinyl.

Decided that the fading adds to the ageing beauty of the van, adds provenance and not going to mess about with it anymore.