I'm in the furniture business.. also use leather exclusively for my around the house furniture as well as in my wife'* car. Get a good conditioner (I recommend Valspar'* Guardsman products) and you've got smooth sailing if you treat it as you should.

Leather is as durable as it gets as long as you clean it and treat it right.

So can you recommend a way to fix the cuts, or am I better off to just replace that section of the seat?

Grimm,

I've got some horrendous surface cracking in the butt-cheek leather on my 98 LeSabre:



I'm using two products recommended by this place:
http://www.thematri-x.com

1) LSF (leather soft fill); a sort of a "cream" heat-set polyurethane to fill the cracks
2) ColorBond; an OEM color-matched rattle-can leather and plastic coating (similar to the SEM system)

Prep includes fine-sanding down rough edges, then clean with a 5% Woolite / 10% rubbing alcohol / 85% water mix (like SEM soap), then wipe with acetone (like SEM prep)

Then fill the cracks with LSF, "squeeging" to even with the surface. Set with heat gun.
(Note: LSF is not meant to repair tears or holes...just fill those multiple feather cracks in the surface coating)

Clean it up again, then spray with ColorBond.

I did my steering wheel with the Colorbond a week ago, as the brown leather underneath was showing through...it'* held up very well so far, and colormatch was perfect. I'll let you know how the LSF / ColorBond combo works out on the seat cracks.

Grimm,

The LSF product I mentioned in the prior post couldn't be any easier to use on surface cracking like you have on your bolster (and like I had in alot of spots, see prior post for some "before" pix).

Fine sand the ridges of the crack, squeege LSF in with a rubber spatula, cure with a hair dryer on high, clean up with some acetone, then coat.

This ColorBond coating took 3 mist coats, 10-15 minutes apart, and was saddle soaped and mink oiled 30 minutes after the last coat.

Here'* the finished drivers' seat I did today (color looks different from "before" pix because the lighting'* different):





Looks like a new seat!

Including removal, crack repair, cleaning, coating and reinstall, I did all the seats today in about 6 hours (once you start looking, you'll find spider cracks everywhere ).

I'll let you know how it holds up.

Looks great!

Wow, nice job!

Thanks for the compliments.

P.*., I bought the smallest-sized jar of this LSF product I could (4 oz jar cost me about $20). I used maybe about 1/2 of it, and the stuff has a shelf life of only about 6 months. The 1998'* done, and the 2004 is not even close to having any leather cracking issues. The rest of this LSF is going to get wasted just sitting in my garage. Anyone want it?