"Sn210" (sn210)
03/15/2014 at 17:31 • Filed to: None
1
0|
"Sn210" (sn210)
03/15/2014 at 17:31 • Filed to: None | 1
| 0 |
Finally got a nice enough day to detail my car. It's the first time I'm doing it under my ownership. I have a serious problem where I seem to have fun detailing cars, and this winter has been killing me.
The car has 6 year old black paint on it that wasn't up to my standards. There were swirls everywhere and tons of light scratches. I never wanted a black car because I know it's tough to keep clean, but when there's only two cars for sale in a 200 miles radius and they're both black, you kind of have to get black!
Here's a shot of my fender so you can see what I'm dealing with:
Unfortunately, this has become a three day process. In the past, I've washed and dried my car the night before so I could detail without dealing with any water drips. I got caught in a passing rain shower this morning on my way to use my inlaws garage, so I lost some time having to drying before I could start. I think it slowed me down with the clay and polish too. So I saved waxing for tomorrow, but I made great progress with my paint today.
I started yesterday with a wash and dry. I've been going with the two bucket method. It seems to do a pretty good job keeping the dirt off my car since my rinse bucket gets pretty dark by the time I'm done. This morning I used some clay to pick up any contaminants missed by my wash mitt.
If you've never used clay before, you might not want to start. After you've tried clay, you'll never be able to wash and wax without it. The difference is amazing! For those of you who don't have experience with clay, it's literally taking a piece of clay and rubbing your paint with it. You use some sort of lubricating agent, like I use some speed shine. I've got some advice if you want to give a clay bar a try. Watch out for seams in the body that can catch clay, like with my side mirror. Now I've got a yellow line to deal with!
Another thing is to be careful after using clay on an area that you know you'll pick up more contaminants, like around your wheel wells and lower parts of the rear bumper. Make sure to fold that shit back into the clay so you don't scratch up the next panel you work on.
It really does make a difference. The proof is in the clay:
Here's a picture of my hood; I've cleaned the upper half with clay. Can you see the difference?
After going over each body panel with the clay bar, I switched to polishing. I used my random orbit buffer and a low grade polish for light scratches and swirls. It did a pretty decent job, but I think I would have been better using a higher grade. The stuff I've got is available in three stages, so I think I'll try the next step up when it's time to detail again in the summer. I went over a couple of panels a couple of times like my fenders, drivers door, and trunk lid because they had the most scratches. I had some weird oxidization shit going on on the trunk lid, so I took some extra time to address that too.
Remember my front fender? Here's what it looked like after I polished the upper half twice
Finished fender:
Heres a close up of the polished fender compared to my untreated hood:
After about six hours of work and hurting my back (because apparently I've aged from 26 to 104), I decided to call it a day and wax tomorrow. I still want to shine my black plastic bits that have seen too much sun, too. My inlaws let me keep my TL in their garage overnight and let me borrow their Jeep to get home. I'll pay them back by doing one of their cars in the Spring.
Stay tuned for part two tomorrow!