Rickrack & Rydawg: Breaking the Gloss Barrier! (lots of pics!)

[imported_rydawg]

Thanks David Fermani!



Thanks Denzil!



Thanks Vroom vroom!



Thanks Yojeankim!



Thanks to everyone else for all the great comments!



More to come next week.

[baseballlover1]

GOOD LORD! THat looks like it took FOREVER! I know from experiance that some of the better body shops use the hardest CC.



THAT LOOOKS EFFING AMAZING GUYS!

[imported_shine]

Do you guys know how much paint was removed from start to finish? Or in any of the steps for that matter.

[04LemansZ]

That is some awesome work!

[imported_rydawg]

The sanding that the bodyshop did was just to remove the op and flatten out the surface smooth. The compounding and polishing steps that we did to make it perfect hardly removed anything at all. There was a lot of clear on this car and it was extremly rock hard. To get this kind of perfection without removing clear is VERY time consuming and you have to make sure that the right compounds, pads, and techniques are used very precisly.



The body shop said they did have shops in the past burn through their clears and I have no idea of how they could have with this ultra rock hard clear. But then agian, I have seen a lot of shops and just watching how they keep their pads laying around the shop with tons of dirt on them doesn`t surprise me. Most of them used the oldest compounds designed for old clears and have no idea what they are doing.



I have done hundreds of jobs like this and sometimes it is no fun at all.

[Rickrack]

Yes, there was extra clear applied to this car specifically because it was going to be wetsanded and polished after completion. I went around the car with the paint gauge before starting and most of the panels were reading between 9.5 to 11 mils, which consisted of both the factory paint and the new paint. After all of the compounding and polishing was done, I measured the panels again and didn`t see any noticeable difference in the readings, which make me believe that no significant amount of clear was removed from the polishing process. It is almost impossible to tell precisely how much clear was removed, but we were confident that the steps we took were completely safe due to the experience and knowledge Ryan and I have on refinishing freshly painted cars.

[Stratous]

I`m sorry, I didn`t read the 10 pages, just the first one.



First, amazing results! The shine is just spectacular.



But wow, 30+ hours? I think you could rethink your process. I work at a rare body shop where quality truly is priority. I get cars just like this on a regular basis. Bumper to bumper I can wetsand, buff, and polish a car that size in 3 - 4 hours. I have more lights than I can count, a cart filled with the whole line of 3M, two buffers, and some sound canceling headphones. Some 1-on-1 3M training helped.

It`s not cover up work either, when I do a complete in a couple hours, it is complete. The car still looks fantastic weeks later.



The best results I`ve gotten have been following the directions on the back of the bottle. 2x2` area, nickel size of compound, white pad, 2000rpm, medium pressure. Trizak marks are gone in seconds.



Sad part is, I know how technitions work. The car went back to the shop and the techs had their hands all over it to finish, and I`m sure it was washed one more time before the customer saw it.



Time aside, excelent results!

[Rickrack]

I`m sorry, I didn`t read the 10 pages, just the first one.





First, amazing results! The shine is just spectacular.



But wow, 30+ hours? I think you could rethink your process. I work at a rare body shop where quality truly is priority. I get cars just like this on a regular basis. Bumper to bumper I can wetsand, buff, and polish a car that size in 3 - 4 hours. I have more lights than I can count, a cart filled with the whole line of 3M, two buffers, and some sound canceling headphones. Some 1-on-1 3M training helped.

It`s not cover up work either, when I do a complete in a couple hours, it is complete. The car still looks fantastic weeks later.



The best results I`ve gotten have been following the directions on the back of the bottle. 2x2` area, nickel size of compound, white pad, 2000rpm, medium pressure. Trizak marks are gone in seconds.



Sad part is, I know how technitions work. The car went back to the shop and the techs had their hands all over it to finish, and I`m sure it was washed one more time before the customer saw it.



Time aside, excelent results!

First off, if you had read into the post a little more, it explains why it took us as much time as it did.





I have worked on lots of these sort of jobs in my 15 years of experience and this was by far, the hardest paint I have ever worked on.





If you could have wetsanded, buffed, and polished this car in 3 - 4 hours and had the car come out "fantastic", than I should just hang up my buffer and have you come work for me!! :chuckle:





Maybe Ryan and I should each look into taking a 1-on-1 3M training course...



.

[imported_rydawg]

Hahaha..... The 3M guy was already at the shop and he already said that he could never reach the gloss and perfection that we have reached. He said that I should be teaching.



We could have easily did the car in a few hours (cough cough), but that is NOT what the bodyshop wanted. He is already a trained 3M shop too. He wanted above and beyond and was willing to pay for it (his customer was anyway).

[Deep Gloss Auto Salon]

Phenominal work as always... true masters of the craft!!!

[Atlantic Euro]

Wow...



I want to see the black one now...

[Todd@RUPES]

I`m sorry, I didn`t read the 10 pages, just the first one.



First, amazing results! The shine is just spectacular.



But wow, 30+ hours? I think you could rethink your process. I work at a rare body shop where quality truly is priority. I get cars just like this on a regular basis. Bumper to bumper I can wetsand, buff, and polish a car that size in 3 - 4 hours. I have more lights than I can count, a cart filled with the whole line of 3M, two buffers, and some sound canceling headphones. Some 1-on-1 3M training helped.

It`s not cover up work either, when I do a complete in a couple hours, it is complete. The car still looks fantastic weeks later.



The best results I`ve gotten have been following the directions on the back of the bottle. 2x2` area, nickel size of compound, white pad, 2000rpm, medium pressure. Trizak marks are gone in seconds.



Sad part is, I know how technitions work. The car went back to the shop and the techs had their hands all over it to finish, and I`m sure it was washed one more time before the customer saw it.



Time aside, excelent results!

Ignorant post imo... Bringing gloss up is one thing but completely removing sanding marks (not just making them shiny, as seems to be the norm for most autopians unfortunatly) takes forever. Sometimes you have to hit the area with a compound many many many times.



Getting a car to 90 percent of its maximum is easy (and takes 1/10 the time) which is obviously what you guys are achieving. As you approach perfection the time needed increases expotentialy. It is obvious from the results there that not only did they get the car perfect but, IMO, did it pretty quickly.

[imported_Denzil]

I`m sorry, I didn`t read the 10 pages, just the first one.



First, amazing results! The shine is just spectacular.



But wow, 30+ hours? I think you could rethink your process. I work at a rare body shop where quality truly is priority. I get cars just like this on a regular basis. Bumper to bumper I can wetsand, buff, and polish a car that size in 3 - 4 hours. I have more lights than I can count, a cart filled with the whole line of 3M, two buffers, and some sound canceling headphones. Some 1-on-1 3M training helped.

It`s not cover up work either, when I do a complete in a couple hours, it is complete. The car still looks fantastic weeks later.



The best results I`ve gotten have been following the directions on the back of the bottle. 2x2` area, nickel size of compound, white pad, 2000rpm, medium pressure. Trizak marks are gone in seconds.



Sad part is, I know how technitions work. The car went back to the shop and the techs had their hands all over it to finish, and I`m sure it was washed one more time before the customer saw it.



Time aside, excelent results!

Directions on the back of the bottle aren`t necessarily in stone per se. They`re more of like guidelines.

[VA_Shine]

Amazing, amazing, amazing!

[Rob Tomlin]

I think they used 1000, 1500, 3000 trizact, but I will have ask to make sure. The paintwork came out superb. The sanding was just OK, but not that great. They did have a lot of pigtails from not cleaning their sanding pads enough. It would have been easier if we had worked on the next day after it was painted, but we had a lot of work in our shop and could not get to it soon enough.



The paint was harder than anything we have ever touched. It makes Corvette paint seem like melted butter. We used 32 plus oz. of just compound on this car, 2 full bottles of 90% straight alcohol, 40 new microfibres, worn out a bunch of new Megs polishing pads. Washed out the wool and foam pads over 40 times just to keep the dust down and the perfection at it`s peak.

Simply amazing work guys!





It reminds me of my black `69 Camaro that some friends and I painted ourselves using acrylic enamel paint. We wet sanded it a couple of weeks later, and I was beyond a nervous wreck when we were done. I was just sure that the paint would be ruined as we would never bring the gloss back again. I actually drove the car around for a couple of weeks (while the paint cured) after it was wet sanded. The car looked like we were starting over, and went back to primer!



The end result after compounding and polishing was amazing. A black car with zero orange peel is pretty awesome!



It was a SS paint though, and certainly wasn`t anything close to what you guys had to deal with here! Hats off to both of you! :up