PortlandRL

I was given this car for some moderate correction including swirls and the ever-present buffer burn. For having only 4500 miles on it, the paint was totally hammered, mostly due to automatic car washes. No good.

I was aiming for 95% correction but only got 90% because some of the scratches were very deep and actually penetrated to the primer. It still looks ten fold better than it did when I began.

Before:



















Some of the buffer burn can be seen in these two photos. The light I was using was not the best for showing it. I'd seen it in different light and it really 'popped' at you.





The clay. For being such a new car (production date 9/07), the stuff the clay pulled off astonished me!





After:

exceldetail

Looks a helluva lot better. And 90% is a passing grade in my book. You start attaining 95-100% correction through the life of a car, semi annually, you start removing too much CC. I would just prefer "making it significantly better then when I arrived".......Wheels look sharp also, which is an eye catcher right off the bat.
Products?

TSC17

Looks good...and what he said...what products?

PortlandRL

Owner told me he'd waxed the car two weeks ago so I washed it using the dish soap method to strip that coat. Kind of pissed me off because it felt nice and smooth.

For clay, I used some AutoMagic speed shine and Griot's clay. That worked out great and again, a ton of contaminants on this car.

I use the Griot's buffer and polishes and started out with a stage 3 polish (2nd least abraisive) on the hood. That took care of the burn/holograms but left quite a bit of the swirls. A second pass with stage 2 (2nd most abraisive) got it looking ship shape.

Now here comes the clusterfuck of the job. I am not at all happy with the Griot's wax because it is impossible to remove without marks that look like buffer burn. The stuff just smears like crazy and won't come up. We tried a section of the hood with Mother's Wax and the Griot's stuff. The Griot's wax brought out a depth in the paint the Mothers did not so I decided to give it one more go. Big mistake. We got what we thought was all the wax off and put it in the sun and holy shit! It took two people speed-shining and wiping down with MF cloths to get it looking better for delivery. I'm looking forward to trying the UPP 4-star wax. Anything is better than this stuff.

As for the wheels, I used a garden variety microfiber was mitt (not the best quality but great for wheels) for the spokes then came back through with Q-tips on the dimples and the grooves in the spokes.

The interior was not bad at all so a quick vacuum, dust, and window cleaning and it was set to go.