A Diesel From Across The Pond!

[ardandy]

The weathermen promised no rain and a bit of sun, so we brought the canopy, coats and halogen light out with us! The detail today is a Peugeot 306 HDI, used as a workhorse so the scooby can stay indoors. Still, even if it`s not the main car you`ve still got to look good right?



Rob wanted a full machine polish on the beast and this is how we did it!



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We started off in the usual manner of taking paint depth readings. Averaging 145um accross most of the car bar a wing that had 220um, an obvious sign of a respray. This was plenty for us to work with so we carried on.



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The cleaning stage begins with a good blast from the jetwash..........



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..........followed by a couple of washes using the Gilmour Gun, Lambs Wool Wash Mitts & nice orange buckets!



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From there we moved onto the door & boot shuts, spraying them with Meguiars APC from the spray bottle. These were wiped using microfibres and rinsed down with the jetwash on trickle.



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The alloys came next, cleaned with a long brush for the insides and some more microfibres for the alloy face. Meguiars Super Degreaser was the weapon of choice for this.



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This is the colour of the rinse bucket after the initial washes.



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Now it was claybar time! Meguiars Overspray Clay Mild in a lovely blue was used. Here`s Harry posing as we forgot to take a pic of it during mid clay!



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The upwards facing panels (bonnet, roof etc) were pretty bad, given the total lack of wax on the car when we got it, it`s not suprising it had picked up some contaminents. The car was washed again using the process above after we had finished.



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Thankfully we didn`t pay attention to Mr Weatherman as we were prepared for the inevitable rain, which decided to start just as we were about to dry the car! Here`s our rather sturdy way of keeping us and the car out of the bad weather. Take that rain!



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The car was dried with the rather nice Sonus Der Wunder Drying Towels and a pump spray full of Meguiars Last Touch.



We were now left with a bit of a nightmare when swirls, or in this case scratches, are concerned. It has to have being one of the worst uniformly scratched cars we`ve done! Here`s some evidence!



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Knowing we had a good amount of paint on the car and the fact it looked like it had being cleaned by the previous owners with a brillo pad, we set off getting the best polish/pad combo, settling on our favourite Meg`s #83 with the yellow Sonus SFX pad. Here`s Harry in action! Remember to keep the cable out of the way folks!



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The next several hours were taken up by both of us going over the whole car using this combination.



This pic shows a wierd scratch (or rather lots of scratches) over the rear arch and the result after we had worked on it.



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We like to get plenty of sun reflection `post polish` shots to show the difference but it was in and out all the time, coupled with the fact it was low in the sky, we had trouble getting a decent non-blury pic. This is all we had that shows up the paint condition afterwards.



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Near the end now! All the was left to do was to wax the car (we chose P21s for this), collonite the alloys, dress the tyres and rubber/plastic trim and clean the glass! Meg`s #38 for the trim, Autoglym Tyre dressing for the tyres and Meg`s Glass Cleaner for the glass.



Once all this was done we went around the car with the fine soft brushes removing any residue from the panel gaps and shuts.



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Around 8 hours in total (inc a noodle lunch!) and we were done. By this time the sun had decided to show itself so we grabbed the chance to get some pics!



Enjoy!



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Thanks for reading!

[steelwind101]

Came up a treat!! You really injected some life in to that paint, i have a 106 in my collection and flat Pug side panels are really good for relfection shots!! Keep away from others in the car park now!!

[serge03]

nice bit of work!



what did you use on the exhaust?

[ardandy]

Megs NXT Metal Polish with some 000 metal guaze.

[ssmokn]

Nice work! I love your pictures and description. The car looks super now.



I wish I could pick one of those up over here in the states. I wish these car companies would wake up and give us more options in small diesel cars. I miss my `79 diesel rabbit :)



A nice small Toyota Yaris Diesel would fit the bill for a daily commuter/beater. How about it Toyota?

[P1et]

That is some very nice work, thanks for posting! Fantastic canopy as well by the way, bet that comes in handy with the UK weather!