Cleaning The Carpets

 A long, hot spell was forecast, so I cleared the decks (quite literally) and cleaned my carpets.

Clean original carpet!

Like many old Ds, my carpets had years of ingrained dirt and grit. 'Clearing the decks' was necessary' as when the Pallas carpets are laid out flat, they take up a lot of room....

Look at the state of those!!!

Nearly all the carpets in my car are gold in colour. That was the colour used with 'veil or' coloured 'jersey rhovyline' seats/ interiors. I suspect the carpets were replacements fitted at some point down the line. Though the are right for the age of my car as the rear footwell carpet has two metal-rimmed slots in it for the seatbelt eyelets. 

I think this carpet isn't original to the car because the colour  differs from this piece. I think this may be the only original bit of carpet left on my car.

Caramel carpet piece from drivers footwell

It's caramel colour - which was the carpet colour fitted with 'naturel' leather colour seats. You can just about see how gold and caramel differ in this photo.

Both cleaned - and a noticeable difference in colour

This part gets trapped under the brake mushroom box and the parking brake pedal and is also screwed to the bulkhead(!)

'Caramel' carpet in the drivers footwell

So, if the rest of the carpet was changed in the past, I think this part was deemed too hard to remove and so it was left alone. If the rest of the carpet was as threadbare as this, I'm not surprised it was swapped for something better.

I also noticed that a lot of the gold carpet panels were loose - not glued down. Another sign that they'd been retro-fitted?

Loose panels in the passenger footwell

I'd carefully separated the thick foam from the floor carpets  - it was hanging off any way - and started by beating the carpets to get any loose dirt out. I did this by laying them face down on our trampoline in the garden and then beating their backs with a sturdy piece of wood.....I then placed them on the patio and vacuumed them to suck up anything that I could.

I did that a couple of times and got the carpets to a point where I felt they were about as clean as a 'beat and sweep' could make them.

I bought a couple of small stubby kitchen scrubbing brushes from B&M.

Carpet cleaning weapons

For the vinyl section on the carpeting fixed under the seat rail, I mixed some vinyl cleaner solution....

.....and used a stubby brush in a circular motion to raise a foam on the vinyl - which I then wiped away. I did this a couple of times and the vinyl came up really well.

For the carpets themselves I used our Vax upright carpet cleaner. It wasn't possible to use it in upright mode because of the bound edges of the carpets. Instead I used the extension nozzle. Initially I tried just using the spray function on the extension nozzle to apply cleaner, but the cleaner was sucked up before the cleaning brush was able to scrub the carpet.

I soon swapped tactics to liberally soaking the carpet with a pump-action spray gun filled with diluted carpet cleaner - and then using my stubby brush to get into the fibres and raise a foam. I then used the Vax cleaner extension to apply a bit more cleaner, scrub a little more and at the same time remove the dirt and water. I rinsed things with a hose pipe set to it's 'fine mist' setting and again used the Vax to remove the excess water

On a couple of occasions I even resorted to pre-soaking some pieces with a hose, before I applied any carpet shampoo. The process was longwinded and hard work - especially over two REALLY hot days, but the improvements were massive.

Rear carpet - partly cleaned

Front carpet partly cleaned

After cleaning, I didn't want to put the parts out in the direct sun for fear of fading, so squirrelled them away around the garden on chairs, benches and tables - where they could benefit from the very warm dry air, but not the sunlight.

Now that it's all dry, I've popped it into the car - just for storage at this point. There are a few Gauloise burns here and there but I really don't mind those at all. in fact I kind of like them.

I have a some spare carpet given to me by George Antoniou. 

They are very sun-faded  and from a right hand drive car, but I think I can use the passenger footwell piece to make a replacement for my caramel drivers side piece.