Well, more like an attempt at seat salvaging.
To be honest, there is no way to restore alcantara seats that are 20+ years old. That many years have taken a decent toll on the seats on the 850, as you may have seen they have significant matting of the seat material, as well as a significant rip in the lower drivers seat bolster. The only real fix is to have the seats re-upholstered but on our limited budget that is simply not possible. For this restoration project I tried to see what I can do as cheaply as possible with tools I already had. One of my ideas was to use my Conair Fabric Defuzzer, which can be purchased on Amazon for $12. Its mostly used for clothing, but in practice it seems to remove matted pieces of alcantara from the seats.
The section on the left is after being run over by the defuzzer, and the section on the right (the center piece of the seat) is what the rest of the seat looks like.
Left side after, right side before.
While the material will never look new, I am still happy with the results. From a distance the seats look much better, and this process only took me around 20 minutes to cover both front seats with multiple passes. After this I used Griots interior cleaner on the fresh sections, but the affect was minimal.
All of this begs the question "Who the fuck bought a Volvo wagon and decided that suede / alcantara was the best choice of seat material!?" If the car had been garaged all of its life maybe it would have been ok, but this car was being used constantly as a family hauler and daily driver for almost all of its life. By some miracle the rear seats are almost perfect, and god bless the fact that the steering wheel, armrest, and headliner arent made of the stuff.