Polished Bliss vs Alpina B10 Wagon

This one was recently done by Clark, here is his report...

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This was one done during the middle of last week and I'd looked forward to it for a while but at the same time I was dreading it due to the amount of paint on it and the fact that I already knew what the paintwork was like!

The car itself is pretty rare here - only 11 were brought to the UK as far as I'm aware and this one with the spec it has was worth nearly £75,000 when new! Nearly 8 years on and it still drives like a new car (I've had the pleasure of releasing those 350 horses several times now, much to the encouragement of the owner!)

This car is on a maintenance plan and has already been in once before but that was to get the interior fully detailed in order for me to spend as long as possible on the exterior when it came in for its 3 day correction detail.

So here it is 3 months on (the car is on a quarterly plan) from its last visit when I'd just thrown on a coat of Vintage for durability whilst I'd concentrated mainly on the interior:



As you can see, the owner doesn’t really ever let it get dirty!







So on with the detail - first up was Hyperwash @ 60 degrees:



This was left for 5 minutes to dwell...



...then it was rinsed off at high pressure - the Vintage still beading like it was applied yesterday and that's not even on a nicely machined surface yet:





The wheels were done with Menzerna Gel 7.5:



Arches/tyres/shuts/fuel cap were done with Megs SD cut 10:1, as was the engine bay:





I then washed the car with the 2BM and then rinsed off, followed by Tardis to remove some of the recently collected tar spots:



A final rinse followed and the car was then put inside for a mild claying session to remove any small contaminants that may have bonded since its last visit and also to ensure all the wax was removed prior to polishing.

I didn’t go daft with pictures at this point as I really wanted to crack on and get machining. I've done one of these B10's in the same colour before (although it was a saloon) and the paint was ridiculously hard and needed a lot of effort to remove minimal swirling - one of the hardest I've ever polished and whilst the paint wasn’t really that swirly on this one, it was full of RIDS:



Luckily, the car was showing healthy paint levels all round with everything being original except for the front bumper which was just recently painted.

Alpina's tend to be around the 200 micron mark:



Polish of choice was 3M Fast Cut Plus and a 3M Compounding Pad @ 1500-2000rpm's:



Results after 2 hits:









Rear 1/4 before:



After:



This is where the correction shots stop as I didn’t take any more pics during that stage, I was just too aware of the size of the car and the severity of the defects in some places. We have a new range of polishes on test at the moment and these were used (a) for when I needed a bit more cut than the Fast Cut Plus and (b) Rich played about with them on the rear end of the car with the G220 to see how they stood up. Two solid days were needed for the correction before I could move onto the finishing polish - this was Menzerna 106FA on a 3M Polishing pad:



The above is how much you typically need after initially "priming" the pad:



Once all the machine work was done, out came the duster:

Now, although Vintage was applied previously to the car - we suggested swapping over to Werkstat from now on as we felt it would offer more in terms of wetness and flake pop plus durability is excellent after a decent amount of coats are applied. I love the acrylic system and can't see me swapping over to anything else on my car for the time being. My dad’s 993 turbo (silver) now wears around 15 layers (at the last time of asking him anyways!) and just today I applied it to his Focus RS - so it's fair to say it's quite popular with us!



So, up first was the Prime:



This was worked into the paint, much like you would with the likes of HD cleanse etc:



This was applied to the whole car and then buffed off:



I then applied Acrylic Jett:



You can add as many layers of this as you like providing you leave 30 mins in between coats - time allowed me to get 2 coats on this time. I'd have liked to have got more on but I just ran out of time in the end. All the usual bits were also detailed including the engine bay, using 303:





The interior received nearly 5 hours of work the last time the car was in so all that was needed this time was a quick hoover and a wipe down of all surfaces, etc:







The wheels were sealed and tyres dressed by our newest member of staff, Marsha (I seriously fear losing my job if she ever learns how to machine polish because I can’t find fault with anything else I get her to do on the cars!

So after a thorough wipe down with Acrylic Glos the next morning, this was the final result:

Cheers for looking!