Much of the soft-touch in this car was absolutely battered: glove-lid, handbrake, handbrake cubby, console, console sides. The only things that were unmarked were the panel adjacent to the glovebox lid and the one above the pedals. The whole lot gave the car a real tired old second hand car ambience. As I've said before on here, driving an old car is one thing, feeling like you're driving an old car is quite another.
I'd noticed that the Instant Valet spray I'd been using around the interior seemed to react slightly to the soft-touch.
This is Donald. he came to stay at Christmas and hasn't left. He seemed confident that combined with Decasol Instant Valet he and his friend, Mr Duck, could clean off the offensive finish.
It turned out the Donald couldn't clean up the mess after all. He had used too much hair product so was too course. Mr Duck was too worn.
I stepped in and went through an increasingly desperate search for something that would strip the finish more aggressively without touching the substrate.
I was all out of ideas until my eye fell upon this Wurth product (on the left, above). It's been in the attic for many years (ten, twelve perhaps). Is it ethanol? Anyway, whatever it is, it works really well.
I found the trick was to paint it on and try to catch it as the finish was halfway from being too soft to re-hardening again. At this point I could simply rub it off with a dry towel. It needed to be dry to have enough grip to peel the finish away. I did try a wet cloth but that just slipped over the soft surface.
Any remaining bits could be tidied away with my neighbour's toothbrush.
I'd say, the actual stripping of the whole lot (not counting seat removal) took a couple of hours. It has completely transformed the interior. What did surprise me was that every bit of the soft finish came off: even right in the depths of the grain of the plastic underneath.
What's been fantastic is that there is not a mark on the underlying plastic: all of the scratches, particularly across the face of the glove-box lid disappeared with the soft-touch. Very happy with that.