It's been a good start to 2010 for us so far with 2 Ne Plus Ultra Details already complete and this is the first one - A Beautiful example of one of the all time great Ferrari's with only 22k on the clock (and an aftermarket exhaust that would make any petrol head grin like a child!
)
Here's the car upon arrival, in for the best part of 10 days - considering it had just been driven 20 odd miles on salt/snow covered roads it had stayed amazingly clean:
To help with the washing and polishing, I removed a few bits and pieces including the number plates and rear prancing horse badge:
Front grill also removed...
So, onto the wash process. Up first was R222 through the lance at 60 degrees:
This was left for a couple of minutes and then rinsed off thoroughly at high pressure:
A good level of protection was still evident from the owners previous wax applications:
I then worked round the car with R222 and a Raceglaze detailing brush to clean all the exterior trim etc:
Meanwhile, Colin was working on the wheels with Gloss-It wheel gel (4:1) and tyres/arches with Meguiars Super Degreaser (4:1):
Once all the exterior trim had been cleaned I turned my attention to the door shuts...
Then the engine bay was treated in the same way - R222 applied, agitated and then rinsed at 60 degrees:
With all the various details now attended to all that remained was to wash the paintwork with Meguiars Shampoo Plus and the 2BM:
Then rinsed:
A quick once round the car with Autosmart Tardis showed next to no signs of tar spots so after a final rinse off the car was put inside for claying.
Meguiars Mild Clay (mild was used as there was very little contamination present on the paint) and water for lube was used:
The car was then dried off using PB Luxury Drying Towels and the Black Baron Drier:
Now the car was ready for polishing so I began to take detailed paint readings:
The 355's are prone to galvanic corrosion where the rear pillar meets the back quarter so it's quite common for them to have seen some paintwork done on these areas and as the owner had suspected, this was confirmed with the paint gauge:
Paint readings were as follows:
Roof: 150-200 microns
Engine Cover: 180-200 microns
Bonnet/wings/bumper: 200-400+ microns
Rear Quarters: 200-400 microns (with the odd high spot as the gauge pic shows above)
Rear bumper: 200-220 microns
Doors: 150-200 microns
So as the readings will show, the car had seen a respray to the front end (to remove a few stone chips) as well as the rear to fix the corrosion on the quarters with the doors,roof,engine cover and rear bumper being original. It has to be said at this stage that the quality of the paintwork was extremely good which was very pleasing on such a stunning example - quite often we see poor paintjobs letting down so many supercars etc but fortunately this was definitely not one of them :thumb:
Now it was time for a few defect shots:
As you can see, the defects were pretty deep in places with large random scratches being the biggest problem.
