The 1990- XJ40 has a different leather than the 87-89. With the 1990 XJ40 the leather all of a sudden got a vinyl glossy feel to it.

Does anyone know what happened there? What did they change? New tannery or different clear-coating on the leather or what?

 

How odd. I wouldn't say the leather in my 1992 Sovereign differs from the 1987 XJ40 which preceded it. The seat design is slightly different though.

Some late cars such as the 3.2S and XJ6 Gold do seem to have a different leather though, at least to me. It wears less well. They are much later cars than yours though, launched in '1993.25' model year.

 

They are different. I even read a 1990 rest review in a car magazine where the motor journalist commented that the leather in the 1990 felt slippery and less nice than the earlier cars.

 

The leather in our '93 Vanden Plas (Daimler) is much softer than the leather was in our '88 Sovereign. My understanding is that the Vanden Plas / Daimler cars were fitted with "Autolux" leather, a very fine, soft, garment-grade leather with virtually no grain or pebbling. The downside is that this super soft leather wears more quickly, so I've had to do quite a bit of rejuvination, repair and re-dying:

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I wonder if the "Base" cars received a different quality of leather with a thicker surface finish, or if perhaps the leather in your car has been redyed and coated with something like Klear Kote from Leatherique?

http://www.leatherique.com/products.html


Cheers,

Don

 

Don, I don't have any XJ40-specific experience but broadly speaking, yes, it wasn't unusual for base model cars to get less-than-perfect hides, often embossed to hide defects. The embossed leather can take on a different and glossy-ish appearance at times.

My Ser III base model, oddly, had embossed leather on the front seats and smooth leather on the rear. Ha !

Cheers
DD

 

Yes the motor journalist testing the 1990 claimed that the new leather felt slippery due to heavily embossed. I've sat in probably 20 XJ40s and it seems to me that all 90-94 have the same slippery leather and the pre 1990 have the non slippery leather. On finished leather there is polyurethane clear coat cover which according to British standards can be thicker than 0.15 mm if it's supposed to be called genuine leather. I've done a little reading up on leather and it seems to me that there are many many different variables that come into play when the question of the quality of a leather is to be assessed. It's not only from which part of the animal the leather has been taken, it's not only from what layer of the hide it's been taken from (the bottom layer is often used for those work gloves you often see for sale at places like Home Depot). The top layer is the more durable layer. Anyways, 100s of other factors come into play. I wish some leather guy working at Jaguar at the time could tell me the story.

 

That's an impressive job on your seat by the way!

 

Paul's Jag in Florida is the ULTIMATE jag leather expert, he bought all the old stock, hides and patterns and used to supply replacements - why not give him a call/email?

Larry