This Mercedes CL500 was brought in over the summer for a complete interior and exterior detail. The owner was attending a car show and wanted the car looking its best, so we set a date to bring the car in, which was a couple days before my wedding.
The car was in pretty good shape to begin with, but needed a little bit of work to get it looking its best. It had recently been in the body shop getting some paintwork done, so it was a bit dirty as you can see in the pictures below.
After snapping a few before pictures, Ryan and I pulled the car in the shop to start prepping the paint for polishing. We gave it a standard hand wash and gave all the tires, wheels and wheel wells an extensive cleaning. We noticed the paint was beading heavily, which meant there was some sort of glaze, wax or sealant present, which would have to be removed in order to make polishing easier.
After using a degreaser to remove whatever products were on the paint, we also noticed that there was some overspray present. We clayed the exterior, which did remove some of the overspray, but we weren’t able to remove all of it.
The following pictures were taken after the wash and prep. You can see the overspray present on most of the panels, which would be removed once we started polishing. The paint had a very dry and sterile look to it and lacked any real gloss or depth, but not for long!!!
