Polished Bliss: Probably the worst one yet...
30 May 2008, 04:00 PM
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Polished Bliss: Probably the worst one yet...
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:
Polished Bliss: The Worst Car Yet? (Evo V) - Detailing World
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!
) 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
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!)
- 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
Overspray gone on the door (excuse the slight smears):
Roof was done too:
Thanks for looking
Clark
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:
Polished Bliss: The Worst Car Yet? (Evo V) - Detailing World
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!
) 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
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!
)- 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
Overspray gone on the door (excuse the slight smears):
Roof was done too:
Thanks for looking
Clark
30 May 2008, 06:39 PM
#4
I remember seeing the ca in the flesh at about 5pm on Day 1 whilst I was hounding Clark about ideas to sort out the keying on our Discovery and this car look bad!.
He took the time and talked me through how they were going to rectify it, supplied what I needed to sort out our car at a very good price and....surprisingly enough..........the keying in now gone on the car and it looks like it never happened.
Cheers to Clark and the gang at PB for once again coming through like real troopers and convincing me that there is nothing worrying about wet sanding a car with 2000 and 4000 grit pads and a mild polish with the fine grade 3M compound he supplied.
I just took delivery of a BRAND NEW Touareg in Silver and I think you can guess who'll be the first any only choice on getting the best look out of the car.
Nice one guys!
Russell
He took the time and talked me through how they were going to rectify it, supplied what I needed to sort out our car at a very good price and....surprisingly enough..........the keying in now gone on the car and it looks like it never happened.
Cheers to Clark and the gang at PB for once again coming through like real troopers and convincing me that there is nothing worrying about wet sanding a car with 2000 and 4000 grit pads and a mild polish with the fine grade 3M compound he supplied.
I just took delivery of a BRAND NEW Touareg in Silver and I think you can guess who'll be the first any only choice on getting the best look out of the car.
Nice one guys!
Russell
Last edited by WUZ; 30 May 2008 at 06:41 PM.
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30 May 2008, 10:01 PM
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Thats unbelievable! What a job! I wish i was closer because you could have my car for a couple of days!
If you can do a job like that on the elise, My car would look mint!
Well done guys!
Very dedicated!
If you can do a job like that on the elise, My car would look mint!
Well done guys!
Very dedicated!
30 May 2008, 10:34 PM
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awesome work but the guy was a mug to get his car back like that in the first place
you guys are skilled peeps
whats the damage to someones pocket to get that work done??
you guys are skilled peeps
whats the damage to someones pocket to get that work done??
31 May 2008, 07:32 AM
#12
Hats off Clark, top job on a car most folk would have thrown the towel on !
Top tip here is if your car is unfortunate enough to need bodyshop work thoroughly check it over when you get it back. My sisters car not so long ago came back with a panel painted off shade from the rest of the car. When her husband took it back they agreed it was - and couldn't answer why it was handed back in the first place !!! Not to mention whatever polish they gave it afterwards left the resprayed section looking worse than the rest of the car (obviously her husband and myself had already worked on the car before the bump!). Needless to say the two of us went to collect the car second time round. Think it had a new start apprentice work on it on his own !
Top tip here is if your car is unfortunate enough to need bodyshop work thoroughly check it over when you get it back. My sisters car not so long ago came back with a panel painted off shade from the rest of the car. When her husband took it back they agreed it was - and couldn't answer why it was handed back in the first place !!! Not to mention whatever polish they gave it afterwards left the resprayed section looking worse than the rest of the car (obviously her husband and myself had already worked on the car before the bump!). Needless to say the two of us went to collect the car second time round. Think it had a new start apprentice work on it on his own !
02 June 2008, 02:59 PM
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It looks a lot more presentable now but why do people accept cars back from the bodyshop without inspecting them first?
My wife's car was involved in an accident last year and a very well regarded local bodyshop did the repair. I went with her to collect it and refused to accept the car as it was so bad. They went to get the paintshop supervisor and I was expecting an argument, but he took one look at the car, apologised and took it back for another 10 days.
When we eventually picked it up, it was perfect. Bodyshop's are very expensive so don't let them get away with a rubbish job.
My wife's car was involved in an accident last year and a very well regarded local bodyshop did the repair. I went with her to collect it and refused to accept the car as it was so bad. They went to get the paintshop supervisor and I was expecting an argument, but he took one look at the car, apologised and took it back for another 10 days.
When we eventually picked it up, it was perfect. Bodyshop's are very expensive so don't let them get away with a rubbish job.
02 June 2008, 11:04 PM
#17
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looks awesome now, but why would anyone have a car like taht in such poor paint work condition. it should have been taken backto the body shop to be re done.
aslo.. as asked earlier, what does it cost to have your car cleaned that takes 32hr??
our local (now closed petrol station, being used to wash cars) car wash charges £4 per car and takes 5mins!! lol
5minsx20 = 1hr = £80
32hrs x £80 = £2560
aslo.. as asked earlier, what does it cost to have your car cleaned that takes 32hr??
our local (now closed petrol station, being used to wash cars) car wash charges £4 per car and takes 5mins!! lol
5minsx20 = 1hr = £80
32hrs x £80 = £2560
03 June 2008, 11:11 AM
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Thanks for the comments guys.
The owner had basically bought the car for the way it drives and he had to admit that he wasnt the fussiest of people, but now after seeing the before and afters he has been converted and i have every confidence that he will manage to maintain it to a good standard. I have to admit that i do still find it a bit odd that he still didnt find the machine splatter up the door cards etc a bit poor but never mind...
The job cost him £395 + Vat as it was a 2 day correction, but if we had seen the car before hand it would have been in for 3 days at £595 + Vat - it's just one of those things and it was one of the few cars we hadn't been able to view before quoting as he was from Edinburgh. Luckily there are no more like that except for a Ferarri 360 CS also from Edinburgh but i doubt it will be quite as bad as the elise.... (bloody hope not anyways!)
Clark
The owner had basically bought the car for the way it drives and he had to admit that he wasnt the fussiest of people, but now after seeing the before and afters he has been converted and i have every confidence that he will manage to maintain it to a good standard. I have to admit that i do still find it a bit odd that he still didnt find the machine splatter up the door cards etc a bit poor but never mind...
The job cost him £395 + Vat as it was a 2 day correction, but if we had seen the car before hand it would have been in for 3 days at £595 + Vat - it's just one of those things and it was one of the few cars we hadn't been able to view before quoting as he was from Edinburgh. Luckily there are no more like that except for a Ferarri 360 CS also from Edinburgh but i doubt it will be quite as bad as the elise.... (bloody hope not anyways!)
Clark
03 June 2008, 09:22 PM
#19
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money well spent if he wanted to now sell the car back on, easily get your money back.
would a THREE day correction got it back even better?
how does the micro machine know how thick the paint is on each panel?
would a THREE day correction got it back even better?
how does the micro machine know how thick the paint is on each panel?
04 June 2008, 03:09 PM
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Yes, the 2 day detail aims for 95% correction, and the 3 day detail 99% - in this case though, around 95% would have been the maximum, due to the depth of a lot of the defects on the rear end.
The paint thickness gauge works using ultrasonics, i.e. it detects density differences between the panel and paint layers to give total thickness and in some cases layer thickness information. Very pricey tool, but a necessity based on what we do.
The paint thickness gauge works using ultrasonics, i.e. it detects density differences between the panel and paint layers to give total thickness and in some cases layer thickness information. Very pricey tool, but a necessity based on what we do.
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