2000 Chevy 1500 Z-71. Customer posts on another board I frequent. He'd taken a trip prior to me detailing it, so there were a lot of bugs on the front end.
Before:
Washed with ONR, claying as I washed. I used Optimum Power Clean cut 3:1 with water on the front end to remove the bugs. 30 second dwell time worked out great.
The paint was swirled but considering the age of the truck, it could have been a lot worse!
I first tried using
Meguiars #105 cut 20% with Optimum Compound via
UDM using a yellow
Meguiars polishing pad. Works suprisingly well but was leaving a lot of visible marring. I switched to the new version of Optimum Polish via rotary @ 1500 rpms (final passes at 1000 rpms) using a Meguiars polishing pad. Did a great job on the hood, roof and sides and left the truck nearly hologram free as well. Took me a couple hours to polish out the truck so the hood (which I started on first) had sat in the sun on a low 90 degree day without any swirls showing back up. The A and B pillars required Meguiars #105 using a Meguiars polishing pad to cut the swirls (not sure why the swirls were so hard to remove in those areas) followed by Optimum Polish. these pictures after using OP via rotary (#105/OP on the B pillar shot). Please note the nearly hologram free finish! If the production version of OP is as good as this, I will be very, very happy!
I normally would follow with 3M's Ultrafina but I figured I'd try out Meguiars #151
Paint Reconditioning Cream via UDM using a yellow Meguiars polishing pad to save a little time. It was already mid afternoon and I was doing the detail at his office. Seemed to do a very good job giving the paint additional gloss, depth and slickness. The polishing pad left some minor hazing around the A/B pillars so I switched to the new 7" Meguiars finishing pad to clean them up. In retrospect, I probably didn't save all that much time since I had to go over those areas with the finishing pad too. I finished the truck off with Carnauba Moose. Overall, for two polishing steps (except the areas I needed to use #105 first), I was really happy how the truck turned out. It isn't 100% swirl free, but I got out 90%+ on an 8-year-old daily driver without going too nuts, having to charge the customer a much higher price or making him wait on me to finish so he could leave work. Started at around 9:30 AM, finished around 4:40 PM. Couldn't have asked for a better outcome all thing considered.
Tires, fenderwells and trim dressed with Armor All.
Woolite/water to clean the vinyl, BioKleen TLC for the carpets and seats. Dressed with Optimum Protectant Plus.
Linear Mode
