One year ago I ordered a new leather console cover from topsonline (lovely bits of leather for the cup holder and console cover).

I started recovering the cover last December, bits of plastic broke, then the crazytimes ended without anyone explicitly saying so, and work got crazy busy. This week, I finally finished.

Unfortunately, since it took a year to finish, I have no detailed pictures except the final, below. But I do have advice

1. When you remove the old cover, clean the heck out of the old plastic. Also, if you need plastic repairs, do it at this time (see below).
2. Use 3M 90 spray adhesive, but have your plan ready to go since it dries quite quickly.
3. The heat gun is your friend, helping tighten and deform the leather so the bottom can go back on, especially at the corners around the cup holder.
4. The designer who designed the godforsaken screw posts to the right and left of the cup holder is likely the same person who designed the godforsaken cup holder.

May his time in hell be spent trying to repair the screw posts and cupholders.

5. When repairing the screw posts, my strategy was to remove the old broken plastic down to the side wall of the cover and glue a new screw post to the side wall, removing some of the post with a mill to make the screw hole closer to the wall (right to the edge of the thread on the glued post).

Some materials that do not work for this: ABS, Polycarb, Nylon. A material that does work: aluminum. I used a half inch post, milled off one side of it so that it still captured a screw, but was open to the side wall of the console, replacing the original post.

Some glues that do not work for this: Loctite 5 minute epoxy, Gorilla Glue 5 minute epoxy. A glue that does work: JB Weld Original.

This repair took most of the work for this. I repeatedly failed to produce a good screw post until this week.

6. I also repaired the chrome support mount on the cover by putting a nut on the underside of the cover (on the inside). That was straightforward.

7. My guess is that this two hour job took about 15 hours of labor spread over a year with about 10 failed screw post repairs. Once a screw post held with some force, I finished in 20 minutes.

8. Plastic is always the problem with these cars...

9. Results look good, and now everyone else has stopped complaining about the lack of an armrest.


A year's effort.

 

Very well done, Dale. That was one of the first jobs I did to my wife's 2006 XK8 after we acquired it in early February 2012. I reused the factory cover after removing it and cleaning it thoroughly, tucked several layers of thin foam packing sheathing underneath it, and used a spray-on 3M upholstery glue purchased from Auto Interiors & Tops in downtown Raleigh (the same glue I had used to recover the A-pillars with a couple of weeks before). It has held up fairly well during the past decade-plus....

By the way, glad to see you back here on the forum....

 

Thanks Jon.

The saving grace is that all three of mine have been running well over the last year.

Now that I've written this, all will simultaneously throw rods within a week or have transmission bits separate at speed at the same time the green shower decides to say hi.

 

You know these cars very well indeed....