First off, I want to say that this is more of a painful, longwinded anecdote than any kind of correction write-up. Second, and more importantly, I want to thank Sasha for both letting me work on his car and also for putting up with all the comments I made, mostly bad :wink:, about the condition of his car. Thanks for being a good sport!
So far in my short detailing "career", I've had my hands on a few cars ranging from Kias to BMWs. But we've all heard horror stories of how hard Audi paint can be and how difficult to correct it is. Enter my boy Sasha, who has a Brilliant Black Audi All-Road in pretty swirled-up condition. After talking about it for a bit, and brow-beating him regarding the overall condition of the car, we agreed I could have the car while he was out of town so I could experience the joy of Audi clearcoat for myself. I only had 2 days to work on it, so this was both a way to challenge myself on tempermental paint, and also to do what I could in the time given to improve the appearance a bit. About a week or two before dropping off the car, I had done a test spot via Flex/Megs burgandy pad/M105 to see what this car would need. I'll come back to this later.
When the car was dropped off, I took a few before pics but many of them didn't turn out. I'm still having a hard time with my camera while doing close-ups, so these are the best I have. I need to invest in a new camera soon, but for now this is all I have.
These pics give a general idea to the swirling, but probably due to the time of day, the camera couldn't really capture what the defects looked like in person. During the wash stage, you could see there was no protection on the car, and probably hadn't had any for a while. I didn't bother with any sort of stripping wash, it obviously wasn't needed, so I just washed with Meg's Gold Class.
After a wash and clay, I threw some halogens on to get a better look at the paint. The first pic is pretty accurate as far as what I was working with, the close-up makes it look not as bad, but again my camera doesn't handle close-ups well at all.
I didn't tape up a section to do a 50/50 shot, so I polished up to the door line and tried to show it like that. This was after one round with 105/burgandy/Flex. The whole car was compounded with either this combo or 105/Surbuf/G110, since I wanted to see how that would work as well. It actually cut a bit better, but left noticeable haze compared to the burgandy pads.
Here are a few close-ups with my LED.
Much of the car had deep scratches that really weren't as obvious until the lighter swirls were removed. The sides of the car had front-to-back scratches on the doors, but Sasha does a lot of mountain biking, so this car has probably been on some narrow dirt and gravel roads and been swiped by bushes or a fallen branch, etc. There were obvious deep marks at the edges of both front fenders that stopped at the hood that likely came from mechanics and Jiffy-Lube jockeys leaning against them while the hood was up. There where also some deep, deep scratches on the middle of the hood.
I'm not sure where these came from, unless Sasha has been hosting cock-fights on the hood of his car. They were deep and wide!
Anyway, instead of using my usual follow-up of 205, I decided to try 85rd on a black finishing pad. It's been sitting on a shelf for a while and I never got around to using it so I figured I'd give it a shot here. Apparently, this is where things started to go really wrong for me!
Since I'm used to the 105/205 twins and don't have much experience with Menz polishes, I went way too heavy on the 85rd. I worked it for a while, longer than I probably would 205, and it came off pretty easy. I used an IPA wipe to see what it looked like and was pretty happy with the results.
But I guess the oils didn't come off nearly as well as I'd thought. After the finishing step, I foamed the car with a heavy concentration of Dawn, then rinsed and brought it inside for a final ONR wash before adding BFWD for protection. Everything was looking pretty good, but when it came time to remove the BF, it was streaking and hazing badly. I tried M34 to remove that haze, and it just made it worse. Then I used ONR at QD strength, and that removed the haze but on certain panels I started seeing light towel marks from my plushest towels.
You can even see in these pics how oily the sun refections look.
So I didn't get the outcome I was hoping for, but I DID learn a good bit from working on this car.
First off, the condition was probably worse than a 2 day detail could be expected to fix to 100%. I knew it wouldn't be perfect, and was hoping for 65-75% correction at best,but I didn't realize how hard it really would be to correct, how deep some of the swirling was, and how many RIDS the car was plagued with.
Second, my first experience with 85rd wasn't ideal. I need a lot more practice with this particular polish to learn all the ins and outs, so I can use it to its full potential, and not waste product as I clearly did here.
Also, I still have a hard time understanding how paint this hard to correct can also be this easy to mar at the same time. DSMS posted in another thread about his own experiences with Brilliant Black on his personal car, but it still seems counter-intuitive that it can be hard AND soft at the same time. It definitely
is, it's just hard to get my head around.
I've also told Sasha that due to the amount of oils left on the car, not to expect much longevity from BFWD in this case. When it dies down, I told him to call me and I'll take care of it for him.
Thanks for reading. This car was every bit the challenge I was expecting, and I definitely fell short in a lot of areas. It was eye-opening to say the least, and made me so frustrated at times that I felt like just walking away from it. But I learned a lot from it, especially thanks to Michakaveli, who was always there whenever I had a question. In the end, I'm glad I did it, and hopefully Sasha will give me the opportunity to fix some of my mistakes down the road. It really goes to show that every car is different, and presents its own set of challenges. Learning how to deal with these is the only way to grow as a detailer. Thanks again guys!
A clay bar should work quite well at removing the rubber stripes left on the car, it make take a little bit of pressure but it should remove them all.
