The same sanding process was used by the body shop, which was very difficult to polish back to perfection. The sanding scratches left by the Trizact discs were deeply imbedded in the rock hard clear and didn’t want to come out very easily.
I began by washing the body down to remove any dust / dirt particles that were present from the body shop. Once the car was clean, I t was time to get compounding with the Extra Cut to remove the sanding scratches.
Ryan was working on an Audi, so I started by compounding using Extra Cut on a yellow Edge wool pad. After removing the sanding scratches with wool & Extra Cut, the finish had a considerable amount of hazing left behind as well as wool pad abrasions, which was expected for such an aggressive combo. This step alone took me over 20 hours over the course of 3 days.
Now that I had removed all of the sanding scratches, it was time to refine the finish to remove as much of the compounding haze and pad abrasions as possible. I started polishing the first panel using Extra Cut with a yellow So1o foam pad, but this didn’t seem to want to work as well as it did on the blue car. Even after 2 or 3 complete sets of polishing, a considerable amount of compounding haze remained.
I decided to use a blue Edge wool pad with Presta 1500, which gave me the results I was looking for. This still left some minor compounding haze, but did not clear up the wool pad abrasions left from the yellow pad.
Next, I buffed the complete exterior with Extra Cut using a yellow Meguiar’s So1o foam pad to refine the finish the best I could, but I was not able to achieve the same great results as I had on the blue car with the Extra Cut.
I decided that a more aggressive pad was needed to get out the wool pad abrasions, so I decided to try out SIP on a purple foamed wool pad. This did the trick and gave me exactly what I was looking for. It removed all of the pad abrasions, but it still needed another step before a finishing polish could be used.
Ryan finished up the Audi he was working on and decided to help me out with the rest of the detail. Both the car and the shop were becoming a mess from all of the compounding, so Ryan and I pulled the car outside and gave it a thorough rinse. We took about an hour and decided to give the shop a much needed cleaning. After the shop was clean, we pulled the car back in and gave it an extensive wash.
All foamed up…
Ryan and I chose to use SIP on a yellow Meguiar’s So1o foam pad, varying our speeds from slow to medium and back to slow again using pressure techniques to achieve the best finish possible before the last polishing step was performed.
We were able to achieve about 95% correction with just SIP. To bring the last 5% to perfection, we chose to use Ultrafina as our last polishing step. This made an amazing difference and really bumped the gloss to a new level.
Like the other car, we were asked not to apply any wax or sealant due to the paint needing time to properly cure, so we wiped the car down with straight 91% alcohol to remove any oils that may have been present from polishing.
The final pictures were taken right after the alcohol wipedown with
no LSP. The dust and pollen was extremely bad that day which you might be able to see in the pictures. Ryan and I are very happy with the final results, but are not looking forward to doing another one for a long, long time! I figured out that about 48 total hours were spent on the entire detail, including the interior.
Garage pics…
