New BRM Red Leather Trim Now Available

This has been the subject of various conversations over at least the last few years.
I now have an update, Do you want the long or the short story?

This is the drivers freighting documentation for the client. Its been an adventure!

 

Haha…. Wow, I always knew Brexit was a good thing… should you be selling paper

 

It's enough to make one see RED!

 

I see what you did there lol

 

The long story it is then!

So, on the forum and in the wider world I inhabit we have over the years had discussions on needing to repair steering wheels, driver seat bolsters, and wanting to fit quilted features onto the parcel shelf or rear seat armrests and and..Further, when doing doorcard replacements I'm sure many have noticed that on the back labels is a tag identifying the doorcard plant on feature supplier as Ottawa Leather.
I suppose its worth just mentioning here that a hide is not necessarily the same as another identical hide....Splitting, tanning, colourisation and graining are all done for a specific intended use. Fashion and furniture hides would not last particularly well in an automotive environment. Mini skirts rarely need to be supple at minus 40, and similarly there is a zero uptake in leather sofa's where humidity and heat combine! Yet we sell leather trimmings to both markets and all in between, for children to have 'accidents' on, pets to claw, fake tans to rub off on, and drivers to do 15 hour non stop upon! Hence automotive hides are quite an engineered product.

Some 7 or 8 years back I was in a role where the final part of vehicle testing was to do a complete teardown to inspect and observe for any characteristics which whilst may not have resulted in a driver or occupant comment, were not optimal at end of vehicle life.
One such vehicle had red trim, and during teardown I was able to instruct that the seats be stripped for inspection of the frames to search for some squeak and rattle issues. Well, normally the covers would be discarded as they will have had up to 40 different drivers sitting in the one seat and water dummies - a plastic bottle with the posterior and back form of a human which get filled with water to enable us to ballast a car in a semi representative manner rammed in the others. Well they spill and leak, get dragged in and out so the seat covers in effect are sacrificial in these tests. So, ever environmentally conscious, rather than scrap I popped them in my case, and was surprised to see they were very close to my - at the time - 15 year old BRM seats and the undamaged bits are, near identical to the seat valances and backs!
I left that company in 2019 and went to another specialist vehicle manufacturer for a new product launch where I had some minor dealings with their trim raw materials supplier, and we did discuss doing, for them, a min run of 3 hides, but inevitably the cost was difficult to balance.
Once that job was done, 4000 cars built, I moved on, and fell back into the clutches of my prior host, but in a very different role engineering a couple of very specific parts of the cabin furniture. Part of the rag and fluff brigade! Which in the course of my work enabled me to talk with their hide provider for the product line I was at the time engaged on. So, the Italian hide tanner in question, their min run was 500 squ metres, which amounts to culling a small herd of cows. Again something of a hinderance on the financials...although somewhat cheaper on a hide by hide piece cost, somewhat more than the Scotts who were prepared to do just 3 hides.
Part 2 to follow..

 

I knew you could not stick to the short story

 

The title of the thread gives away the ending, but even so, I'm curious to see how part two develops!

 

War and peace comes to mind.....chapter one!

 

He’s only in 2019 yet, corona-years to follow

Hopefully everything is told before

 

Hi Roland, hope you're well. I think its a reasonable assumption to believe you won't be receiving this year's annual Robert Peston Award for Brevity !!

 

Now, two possible suppliers tested and to be frank only rejected on the grounds of capital investments required. So the concept inevitably set on the back burner whilst we continued to do little jobs with similarly coloured automotive hides sourced from salvage and re-coloured - actually I did win a set of covers from yet another ebay BRM rear seat which without advertising the fact has kept me going for 2 years. Now as we all know Lear were the cabin integrators for Rover R3. And I guess you may also be aware that Lears in house specialist Leather Trim business was called Ottawa Leather..I'd made several attempts to make contact with them over time, but just didnt seem able to find the right point of contact in UK and the Americas. Well at the beginning of the year, I needed 12off row one seats for a test we were scheduling and in this particular case the supplier was Lear Corp. Now before pressing on its worth mentioning that a small snippet had fallen into my orbit that the vehicle manufacturer had revised their cabin colour options and the red-like-BRM was no longer a 'thing'. So in discussing the impending timing requirements for a dozen £2keach seats with the Lear Resident Engineer, I threw in my own enquiry. 'Do they have an archive which can confirm colour and grain for a BRM?' My thinking that having a real specification would be a huge step over asking anyone to copy from sample. And grain would inevitably be wrong as there is little chance of lucking onto the correct roller.
Well, only a few weeks later I was advised that both colour spec and grain were indeed the BRM, just carried through to the other manufacturer after MG Rover had collapsed!, So, I asked...'and is there any redundant stock in the plant in the midlands where the special trim parts were made until a year or two?' Answer 'doubt it, but I can ask...'
And that was all I heard for the next 6 weeks.

 

Building up the tension

 

And after silence for 6 weeks I'd presumed my enquiry had been politely heard, but possibly hadn't gone any further, it certainly wouldn't have surprised me. So you can appreciate my cheer to get an email saying, 'No, nothing in the UK, but we do have something in our Hungarian plant.....' 'Here is our Hungarian Directors contact details, he knows what you want'. Well I was anticipating that what they had would be a quantity of perhaps seat covers and some doorcards, so was quite surprised when told, actually we have a few uncut hides...'But lets do this properly and send you some samples for approval'.
'Great' and so some A4 sized cuts were shipped from Hungary, but after 10 days I'd not received them, so an email sent and I'm told that some of the paperwork for shipping wasn't quite right and they were on the cusp of being returned...., but with some nifty footwork by the Hungarians, the paperwork was forwarded to the import agents working for the couriers and I got them almost a month after despatch. Directly they arrived I checked them against my well used/abused BRM and yes, colour and grain perfect against the cleanest and hidden bit of hide - the underfold of the facing panels of the rear seats. I was able to bring those samples to the Resto Show in March where some of you will have also seen them.
So a deal now agreed for me to take and ship the entirety of their now redundant stock. So with approximate weigh and size of the parcel determined I approached my export agent to handle this inbound shipment. (never needed this support in the pre brexit world - Grrr), but they handle about one outbound shipment a month for me sending 'stuff' all over the world. First step was to just get a price for shipping, it came to about £200 - one of those 3.5t Polish Rumanian Czech, - and Hungarian - van based chassis cabs, or the real value of a single hide, 'so press on please'. But in addition I'd need to pay the agents and of course there will be a VAT bill to clear at arrival at UK customs, so need to set up an account to pay on demand cause I operate under the uk vat limit. And that's when it all started to go wrong! After a couple of weeks my agent got back to me and paraphrasing ' its just too complicated for us, we dont get involved in shipping animal by-products which need special import licences'. Hmmm.

 

At this point I would have looked for a friendly drop off place within the eu.

but you have that and decided against it for a valid reason

so looking forward to the next instalments of how Don R charges the windmills of brexit