As you can see, the paint had its share of swirls, scratches and blemishes from his wife visiting the automated car wash frequently.
Some of the scratches were pretty deep and would have required wetsanding to completely remove them, so Ryan and I decided to do the best we could with just compounding. We removed a great deal of defects, but there were a few RIDS that remained. The owner said it was a lease and it was going to get turned in this May, so we didn’t go to extreme measures wetsanding.
Ryan got right to work claying the heavily contaminated exterior while I started on the extremely dirty interior. After the interior was detailed and the paint was clayed, we broke out the Makita and the Metabo. We got right to work and were not able to take any before pictures under the halogens.
We decided to try SIP on an orange pad, but it was dusting badly and really marring the paint. We then decided to give Presta UCC a try to see if we had any better luck, but this gave us a little trouble as well. The Presta seemed to work better than the SIP, but was acting really weird and had quite a bit of dusting. We broke out the 3M Extra Cut which worked out the best of all three, so we stuck with it for the first stage.
After working on a few panels with the Extra Cut, Ryan and I both experienced that there was something funky with the paint which was causing the panels to out-gas after polishing as well as extreme dusting. We would buff one panel, inspect it under the halogens and then see the panel all of a sudden get really cloudy and haze up. We both believe that the cause of this is from too many visits to the automated car wash by the owner. More than likely, the car wash uses some sort of silicone product which was causing us to have problems. We wiped down the exterior with straight alcohol to attempt to remove whatever was causing these problems.
Here is a pic of the out-gassing after just one pass with Extra Cut:
After the compounding was completed, we buffed the complete exterior with 106ff which really brought the paint back, but still left a considerable amount of hazing. We experienced the same out-gassing after using the 106ff as well.
This is what it looked like after the 106ff: You can see the fogginess and haze left behind.
Here is a pic of me using the metabo:
Since the 106ff didn’t give us the results we were striving for, we decided to use Ultrafina for the final polishing step which brought the paint to a whole new level. It removed all of the hazing we were experiencing and Ryan and I were shaking our heads as we were buffing saying “ this stuff is amazing!”. It finished off with a high gloss, swirl-free finish. This was only my second time using Ultrafina, and I must say that it is an absolute must-have product!
Ryan polishing with Ultrafina:
Here’s a few pics after polishing with Ultrafina. (Don’t mind the dust and slight smudging)
Linear Mode
