Restoring leather on old Ikon 520

Spottymaldoon · Sep 15, 2008

I have an old Zeiss Ikonta 520 from maybe 1933. It's in working condition but the leather looks a little squalid. Please see:

http://richardleveson.com/IMG_0550

Book restorers use a kind of colour-matched 'goop' to cover small leather chips, tears and scuffs - is there a favoured compound in the camera restoring community?

Thanks,
Spotty

Ian Grant · Sep 15, 2008

I just use black shoe leather restorer, on my cameras and that works fine, I guess you could use a bit of latex adhesive with black dye added to cover any chips. I used Black nail polish on the paint chips.

The leather in your photo doesn't look that bad, once it's black again the missing worn bits won't be particularly noticeable

Welcome to APUG BTW.

Ian

puderse · Sep 15, 2008

leather restoration

I have one of these and was very impressed with my first roll! I use black leather dye for shoes followed by Kiwi black wax (flat tin) shoe polish. On the metal and the painted (even on plastic) surfaces I apply Flitz per instructions. Neutral Kiwi works well on all other leather colors, especially leather neveready cases. http://www.flickr.com/photos/23693622N05/ Pix of the camera and shots from the first roll.

Greg Heath · Sep 15, 2008

can you just replace it..
http://www.cameraleather.com/

Ian Grant · Sep 15, 2008

The Makers name, camera mode & serial number etc are all Stamped into the leather, so the problem you lose all that info if you replace the leather. From the larger than life photo it looks like it wouldn't take much to make the camera look pretty reasonably fairly easily.

Ian

Paul Goutiere · Sep 15, 2008

Ian Grant said:
The Makers name, camera mode & serial number etc are all Stamped into the leather, so the problem you lose all that info if you replace the leather. From the larger than life photo it looks like it wouldn't take much to make the camera look pretty reasonably fairly easily.

Ian

Yeah! I agree, it looks pretty good, just restore the leather carefully with black polish etc. and let it be.

naeroscatu · Sep 15, 2008

When I bought a leather couch they also gave me a leather maintenance kit with two chemicals specially designed to clean and maintain the leather. I used this leather cleaning solution (don't have the name) to clean up stained leatherette on my old Rolleicord. After I cleaned up the stains that area seam to have lost color and shine so I applied black shoe polish and got the leatherette back to about 90% of the original condition.

sun of sand · Sep 15, 2008

On a couple cameras I've taken steel wool to the leather ..only because I don't really care for the black

It gives the appearance and feel of a worn leather basketball which I happen to think is great
Yours is probably too good of a camera to do that to but
I think it's pretty dope

Joe Grodis · Dec 3, 2008

Well you can just replace the leatherette which is a lot easier than I thought (I recovered an XGA in RED snake skin) Anyways... judging by the pic I would just give it a shot of black kiwi show polish. Recovering is good looking but you can't ever copy the embossed decor.

Restoring leather on old Ikon 520

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