Ron Ketcham said:
One of these days I will share with all just when the DA was used and shortly after it started to go main stream.
Long time ago, late 1988, if my memory serves me.
Grumpy
I was working for Finish Kare at the time and DAS (Nissan port operations) in Long Beach called the office, I was in San Diego, and was beeped on my pager (long before cell phones, that how long ago it was) so called the office.
Was told to call my contact at DAS as they were in a panic.
Had to be there in two hours, and the 3M and Mequiar's rep was to be there as well.
Seems that the Nissan/Infiniti paint engineers had selected a new clearcoat that contains a flurotelamer resin in it-(base of Teflon) that they believed would reduce or eleminate bird etching, acid rain etching etc.
There were 3000 new Q45 that had to go to dealers in three days for the unvailing of Infiniti, but one small problem.
All had unbelievable swirls in these high line, flag ship, vehicles.
It seems that when they came off the assembly line, there was a large amount of dust nibs in the clear, so they sanded the nibs and buffed them
, then applied a glaze and put them on the ships.
When they were washed at the port, big swirl concern.
This was not acceptable, to Infiniti, the dealers, etc, so the port had attempted to polish out the the swirls, didn't work.
They just got worse.
We three (they at least thought we were) experts, were to attempt to resolve this huge issue.
No matter what any of us hit them with, product, pad, buffer speed, etc, they just kept swirling, like we had done nothing but make it worse. We even tried using the old WaxMaster orbital buffers and no luck.
After a few hours of playing around with product/pad, etc combinations, I was leaning against the C pillar of a burgandy Q45 with my palm for maybe three minutes and then stepped away to look at the car one more time and scratch my head.
I noticed that my "palm" print was in the clearcoat!
Whoa!!!! Talk about "soft clearcoat"!
That's when all three of us starting asking some new questions, and ended up on the phone to the plant in Japan with the lead paint engineer.
We learned of the flurotelamer being added, and figured it was why the clear was remaining soft.
Which he agreed with.
However, the company had a multi-million dollar ad campaign breaking in three days, dealers had spent more than a few bucks on their new facilities, local advertising,etc and at least two cars had to go to each dealer for the launch.
I don't recall the name of the Mequiar's rep, but he told the 3M rep and me about a new tool they were working with and may introduce it to the detailing community, not like anything we had seen at the time.
What the "h", go get it, anything to get this resolved, so he drove to Irvine and came back with two PorterCable DA's, velcro backing plates and some new foam pads.
Didn't make much difference of whose polish product we used, they all did wonders with the paint issue.
End result, Infiniti got a DA and some pads, with the Mequiar's product to each dealer ASAP and instructions of how to use on the other vehicles they would receive in the coming months.
The port took all the DA's that Mequiar's had available and went to work, and the cars made the dealers for the launch.
Neither Finish Kare or 3M got any of the business at that time, but what we did was appreciated and we both got other business from Nissan and Infiniti later on.
Those poor souls that got cars from that production run, what a mess, it was almost as if you looked at them, the showed marring.
A couple of years later a large percentage of those first run cars had clearcoat delamination, etc.
These things happen, to all vehicle manufactuers, just this one is about the first time that DA's were used on more than some body playing in their garage at home.
Grumpy
