Polished Bliss: Probably the worst one yet...

Written up by Clark for DW, copied here by me!

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Once again, i feel i must apologise for lack of presence on DW recently. My computer had a couple of viruses which prevented me from getting much internet access and i've been tied up with various other things but hopefully i shall be on more regularly from now on :thumb:

Anyways, on with this detail.

This Lotus Elise was booked in for a 2 day correction as according to the owner it just needed a "light polish" (we hadnt seen the car previously as the customer had travelled up from Edinburgh):



I'd barely spent 5 seconds looking at it to know that this was going to need a good bit more than a light polish!...











As you can see from the pics, the car has seen some bodyshop work in its short life (everything except for the doors had been painted) and to be honest i'm amazed how a bodyshop can hand a car back in such a mess

They even got polish splatter inside the car!







To make things worse, just about every single panel had huge amounts of overspray which left the paint rough and dull.

We explained to the owner that 95% + correction wasnt going to be anywhere near possible given the time limits and the horrendous condition of the car (if you think it still doesnt look that bad then wait for the halogen shots), so the main aim was to clean the car up as good as possible in the 2 days it was booked in for. I was already preparing for a late late late night!

So, 9am on day 1 beginning with the wash stage:

Pre-foam first:



This was left to dwell while i cleaned the wheels with Megs Wheel Brightener and Autosmart Tardis and the arches/tyres with Megs Super Degreaser.

I then rinsed the car off, taking extra care round the re-sprayed areas as there was some paint already starting to flake off which i didnt want to make any worse!

Zym0l Fabrique was used with a soft brush to clean the fabric hood:





A megs triple duty brush and Super Degreaser was used to remove all the polish residue from the plastic trim. This alone took close to 45 minutes to completely remove it all:



I then washed the car with the 2 bucket method and Shampoo Plus before rinsing and moving it inside for claying. I skipped the Tardis stage as some of the paintwork hadnt been baked and some panels were only a week or two old so i didnt want to risk the chance of stripping any paint off (i've seen this happen back in my Valeting days at VW).

Claying took around an hour and a half with an aggressive clay bar to try and remove as much overspray as possible but to be honest, it didnt remove half as much as i'd have hoped for so i prayed that the polishing stage would help with this.

It was close to 3:30pm before i'd got the car all taped up and ready for polishing, purely down to the fact that so may areas of the car needed properly prepped before i could get onto the next stage. This in itself was pretty frustrating as the majority of it was down to the bodyshop being crap at their job (sorry to put it blunt but it was a disgrace)

With the car all dried off and ready for polishing, i took some more pics to try and show just exactly what we were dealing with:

Air bubbles in the paintwork:



Buffer trails:



Overspray:



More Overspray:



Wee bit more overspray (!)



These marks were apparantly from when the bodyshop put a cover over the car before the paint had fully dried (!?!?)



There were also a fair few swirls and RIDS:









Up untill this car arrived, i'd have said the Evo V detailed in this thread was the worst:

http://www.detailingworld.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=40926

I think loking back at the two that the elise was worse, purely for the fact that the Evo's paint was mostly just oxidisation and etching whereas the Elise had just about everything you could imagine!

Paint readings were taking with the Composites gauge (no metal panels on an elise):

The original paint (which was the 2 doors) was around the 100 micron mark:




The re-sprayed panels was around the 150-200 mark:



I removed several parts of the car to gain easier access for polishing too:






I should add at this point that the owner had purchased the car after the rear end had been painted, and this was by far the worst area on the car (as you can see in the pics) however he had just got the front end and lower halves painted in recent weeks so i started with these bits first seeings as they werent quide so bad as the rear.

Considering the overall state of the paintwork it would have been pretty risky to use the rotary on this car as there was just too many exposed flaws (not to mention the higher risk of burning the paint on composite panels) so the machine of choice was the Meguiars G220 Dual Action Polisher.

I started off with a 4" Polishing Pad and Menzerna 106FA. This achieved an 80% level of correction with 1-2 microns of paint removal but didnt cut through much of the overspray, so i stepped up to a 4" Cutting Pad and Menzerna 3.02.

This achieved much better results with the soft-ish paint reacting well to the polish and pad combination:









Overspray on front bumper:



After:



Before:



After:



It was now close to 7pm and with the completely f*cked rear end still to come, Rich fortunately was able to join me from there on to get the job done quicker which was a huge relief as i was seriously thinking about doing an all nighter!

So now both armed with our G220's, we tackled a side each and powered on.

Again, i must stress that this wasnt a full correction job, but the shots below will show just how much of an improvement we managed to make to the overall look of the car:





This shot shows just how much nicks and RIDS remained though:



I would estimate that to get the car looking as good as possible you would need it for at least 5 or 6 days with 3 or 4 of them being solid machine polishing and wet sanding. Even then i would still advise re-spray work of a decent quality to rectify some areas that were in all honesty unsaveable.

Rich and I agreed to get the car completely de-swirled (or as close as!) before caling it a night so that i could spend day 2 going back over the car with the finishing polish (the paint was soft in some areas and marred like mad so this needed refining).

When we finally fnished it was 2am (seems like a regular thing nowadays! :lol and we were both just so happy to have the main correction done that neither of us were paricularly bothered about what time it was.

Day 2 - 9am:

After around 4 and a half hours sleep it was back to work and on with the 2nd stage of machine polishing. I used Menzerna PO85RD and a Meguiars Finishing Pad which helped sharpen the paint up nicely and added a bit more gloss :thumb:

I then dusted the car down and then gave it a wipe down with Menzerna Top Inspection to allow Rich to apply a coat of Raceglaze 55 while i did the interior.

Interior Process was as follows:

- thorough hoover
- APC wipe down
- Leather cleaned with APC
- Leather fed with Raceglaze Leather Balm (love this stuff! :thumb
- Shuts cleaned and protected with Werkstatt Prime Strong
- seals dressed with Raceglaze Trim Gel
- Glass cleaned with Meguiars Glass Cleaner Concentrate





Rich also gave the car a final wipe down with Last Touch, dressed the tyres with Blackfire Long Lasting Tyre Gel, sealed the wheels with PB Wheel Sealant, polished the tailpipes with Raceglaze metal polish and "de-fluffed" the hood before applying Zym0l Field Glaze by hand.

The owner arrived around 15 minutes early and we finished pretty much bang on 5pm. This made the total work time around 32 man hours in 32 hours!!

Whilst i'm not going to lie and say the car was perfect, i'm sure you'll agree that in the available time we did pretty well. The Customer was over the moon with the transformation too which is the most important thing

Not to many afters as time was short but here's the best of what i got :thumb:

Overspray gone on the door (excuse the slight smears):



















Roof was done too:

Thanks for looking :icon_thumright:

Clark