This was a freebie for a very good friend of mine. This is Mazda Protege5 with a Mazdaspeed front end. The car is probably washed once a year as my friend stopped caring about cars after he beloved EL was written off (will find pics later). I was expecting a lot of contamination but the car is garage parked as much as possible so it cut down the contamination significantly.
This car has been ridden with rust, so my friend used POR15 to remedy that issue. There were spots all over the car that needed attention so while I was polishing, he was wetsanding the areas with 2000 grit for me to polish up to beautiful shine. The aim of this detail was not to achieve paint correction, but to bring out the colour that was hidden by all of the dirt particles that sat on the paint for so long. Overall I'm very happy with the way the car polished up. The paint looked very wet and very slick!
I'll make this write up quick by posting my process and then showing the pictures, as I am currently working on another write up that is taking a lot of my time.
Process:
- Pretreat with P21S TAW, left to dwell for approximately 3 minutes
- CWG @ Paint Cleansing Dilution, 2 bucket method + grit guards
- Wheels cleaned with TAW and Zymol Wheel Brush (which is falling apart after only 5 light uses)
- Tires cleaned with Kleenol @ 3:1
- Clay with Riccardo Clay and ONR Lube
- Rust spots clayed out using TAW as clay lube
- Rinsed and dried with WW MFs
Paint was polished with SIP on a 6.5" white
LC CCS pad. Spread the polish at 1000rpm, broke it down at 1600-1800rpm, then brought it back down in 200rpm increments. I found this helped to keep the polish working and allowed me to bump up the speed whenever I wanted if I felt some area needed to be polished a bit more.
- Paint sealed with 2 coats of Opti-Seal. After layering this product for the past couple of details, I have come to the conclusion that one coat is simply not enough to give the look of a sealant that many go after. Applying more than one coat of Opti-Seal is very fast too.
During claying:
Spoiler polished up:
Roof polished up:
Linear Mode
