Leather Saddle Restoration
 

At what point would one consider leather seats beyond the ability to be restored? When it feels a certain amount of stiffness, or when it starts to crack up?

I ask this because I have come across two Brooks saddles, one is on a friends bike and i think it might be able to be revived, the other is on a bike the has been sitting on campus for most of the semester, which appears to have been abandoned (I'll ok it with campus security first, but it is a schwinn super sport with broken cables and it looks like someone already made off with the rear wheel.) It looks like it might be cracked and I was just curious at what point the line would be crossed for end of the road.

leather treatments can improve old leather , It is time consuming though.

Cracked is generally bad. Point of no return. Dry, is doable. It just takes time. Time. . . Time. . . Time. . .

For re-dying scuffs. . heh. I used a permanent marker.

Even light cracking isn't the death call of a good leather. If you're buying leather care products for the lesser damaged saddle I'd give the bad one a try as well. The real deal killer is once the leather on the bad one is dry if you can load it up and see it flexing and pulling around the rivets that secure the leather to the frame then it's too far gone. But if there's no serious movement around the rivets or pulling at them then it's worth the couple of bucks of ointments and salves to see if you can restore it. Small cracks will all but close up but big ones are there for good. But if the fibers below the cracks are still locked to each other there may be lots of miles left in that piece of hide.