Finally decided that it was time to take care of the swirls in the car's paint.


Started with a wash (Brother helping in the last):




Then tackled the exhaust tips (Dirty and then clean):



Then cleaned up the engine bay with P21s total auto wash and brushes:



Here are the problems I had to deal with 100% all over the car:



Pics of myself and the two brothers helping out (and goofing off lol):



After one pass (did a total of 3) notice it's better but still scratched up:



After polishing I went straight into sealant:



After buffing the sealant out! Looks at it now



When was the last time you cleaned your sunroof? This is what I pulled off the seal and the inner chamber of the sunroof:



Cleaned the interior with leatherique on the chairs and protectant plus on all plastic/vinyl panels and trim:

 

And the final action for the car to make it all official!



Then, finally complete, I took the car out to find some nice places for pictures









Pics of a couple houses in my parents neighborhood:




Pics of my parents place:



The arsenal of everything I used (about half of it is in the box):



Oh and since it takes 8 hours for the sealant to cure, I shut her down for the night, got up and waxed the entire car and started detailing the rest of the car which was this second post.


Many thanks to my parents for letting me kick out their cars and stealing their garage for the weekend, to my brothers for helping the entire time, to Todd Cooperider (http://www.esotericdetail.com/) for his teachings on detailing and his many how-to guides that I now hold as detailing bibles.

 

looks great! is there any way to get rid of old sap stains? what all did you use to get rid of the swirls?

 

Sap stains might need a clay bar. Swirls come out with real good polishes and a decent DA polisher or high speed polisher.

 

Looks like a great job.

 

Thanks guys

 

First off awesome job man.

I plan on getting a porter cable to do detailing part time. In your post you said you used 3 passes to get the results you wanted. Should i go with a higher speed buffer? Or does the passes depend on how swirled the car is?

 

I bought a http://www.detailedimage.com/Porter-...l-Buffer-P331/ to do the work, used medium cut polish with medium pads.

I also picked up some 500w lights so I could see what I was dealing with. After each pass I would wipe off the polish and look at the correction. I ended up doing several passes on each section of the car because that's what it took.

To be honest I should have bought some heavy pads and heavy polish, because the original owner must have washed the car with a boulder!!!!!!!

 

Very good! But we do have a detailing section for these type of threads you know :P

 

^very true, if a mod could move it I would be humbly appreciative.

 

Thanks for the insight. I plan on buying the buffer you picked up. I will play around with the pads and polishes on friends cars that are mighty swirled.

 

A Porter Cable 7424 will do just fine with the right pads. Check out properautocare.com. They have some nice tutorials that explains everything from pad selection to polish and wax selection. You have 2 choices - a DA polisher or a hi speed polisher. The DA takes longer to achieve the same results but is safer for the novice user. A hi speed requires a bit of experience.

 

bookmarked

 

I picked up all of my materials from detailedimage.com. They have probably 30 major detailers all around the US that answer questions from any of us in the "Ask a detailer" section of the website and they have dozens of how-to's on detailing cars.

To point out the one I used:

http://www.detailedimage.com/Ask-a-P...grey-metallic/

This is the guide I followed on my car, using the same materials he used.

Todd Cooperider lives up here in Columbus, so I actually drove up and spoke with him a bunch about detailing the car, very helpful and a great guy.

Todd's ranked in the top 9 auto detailers in the US by AutoWeek magazine.

 

Great job!! It's amazing what a good detail can do to a messed up finish.