Polished Bliss: Shocking Dealership Prep!

This one was done about a week ago, and was a "New Car Detail" although the car was now a few months old seeings as this was the first opportunity we could get the car in.

Here's the car, a new Impreza WRX:






The car wasnt too dirty so it was an easy, straight forward wash with the 2 bucket method and Menzerna 7.5 for the wheels/calipers. Meguiars Superdegreaser was used for the arches/shuts etc. I then clayed with Meguiars Mild Detailing Clay after removing any large tar spots with Autosmart Tardis.


Now inside, we could see the reason the owner came to us. The dealership preperation was shocking to say the least, with alot of marring and some fairly deep RIDS in places:















Now, i know at this point many of you will be thinking the owner installed alot of those defects in the time between receiving the car and putting it into us. Well these are some pics that Rich took when the car was only a day or two old when the customer originally enquired about a detail:










So, on with the polishing!

This is where the troubles began, NONE of our polishes were working. I tried Menz, Megs and 3M and all of them caused the rotary to hop and squeal and just generally pi$$ed me right off. It was the same after a wipe down with spirits too, the polishes just welded themselves to the paint and made it a real pain to buff off.

We've come to the conclusion now that pretty much all black scoobies and some other jap cars have weird paint that reacts differently to the polishes, and talking to Matt @ OYM suggested that he's beginning to think the same. The last problem i had with all my polishes were on a black Evo 5, the time before that was on a black Impreza and then the time before that was on a dark blue Impreza - except for the bonnet on that particular one as it had been resprayed and the polish worked like a dream!

I eventually admited defeat and swapped over to the Megs G220 and settled on 3M's Fine Cut Compound (with a Megs Polishing Pad) as this was the polish that did the job of defect removal best and didnt dust too much.


As you can see in the pic below, correction was 100% but even with the G220 the polish wasnt working that well and caused marring when buffing off:




All the fun of detailing goes out the window with cars like this, it just becomes a chore and you cant wait to get it finished!


Although still very new, the owner had been unlucky enough to receive a bit of damage to the offside rear 1/4. The bodyshop, once finished repairing it had left the finish a little poor to put it mildly...








And what would you know, the polish worked fine on this panel! This backs up our thoughts even further that the OEM paint has something weird going on with it!


After Correction:






Here you can just see where the bodyshop had flicked in the paint to the back bumper:




A couple of attempts with a 4" cutting pad and Fine Cut Compound made a good improvement:




Once the correction work was completed i had to go back over the car again to remove all the marring induced from buffing off the welded on polish. Polish of choice for this was Menzerna Po85RD with a couple drops of Blackfire Gloss Enhancing Polish as we've found this helps to make buffing alot easier :thumb:



This left a perfect finish, although still being a bit difficult to remove:






Once that was done i automatically got alot cheerier, i was so glad to be finished machining!


LSP was next, and the owners choice was Blackfire:




This was applied to the whole car while i dressed the tyres (BF Tyre Gel) and sealed the wheels (PB Wheel Sealant). I then buffed off the wax and was then told to go home by Rich seeings as i'd worked long enough on it. So he did the interior,tail pipe etc and even took all the after pics - what a boss! :thumb:

So here's Rich's attempts with my Camera, dont think he did too bad

Total Work Time: approx 18 hours.

The Invoice has been sent to the Dealership for this one too :thumb:

Cheers!
Clark

The hologramming effect you see in the pics above were due to really crap wash and dry technique at the dealers (i.e - sponge washed and dried with a chamois etc etc) but also there were buffer trails due to poor machine polishing technique too. This is usually caused by running the machine at too high a speed with too harsh a polish and not finishing down properly or following up with a finishing polish to refine. Why they felt the need to machine a brand new car is beyond me but you see it quite alot.

The valeters at the dealerships will machine an entire car in an hour or two, we can take anything between 6-20 hours for this stage alone to make sure its done properly