Mobile-Image : Big Cat Diaries...

[Carn]

It's been a while since I have contributed to the Show & Shine outpost but work amongst other things has been keeping me tied up. Thankfully now that I am on leave I can catch up on a few things

Righty then, this particular car came to me after the owner was unsatisfied with the condition it was delivered in. It was booked in for a 2 day paint correction detail which was completed in a little over 19 hours or so.

First up, some pics of the vehicle as it arrived...











Bug guts all over the front end


Front grille would be interesting to clean up




Exhaust all carbon'd up


Small stone stuck between the bumper and rear lights


Some muck in all the cracks and crevices








Wheels were filthy as well





With the intial inspection over it was time to get the car washed up and cleaned. First as usual was the wheels which were seen to with Sonax Xtreme rim cleaner and various brushes...

Sonax doing it's thing


Ez-Detail brush in action. I find I usually turn to the Ez before going for the Daytona. I think the more densely packed bristles are better suited for more soiled wheels IMO


Caliper and lug nuts cleaned with MI detail brushes





With the wheels and arches sorted I set about rinsing the car thoroughly before cleaning all the panel gaps, emblems, etc with 5:1 APC.

Trim & panel gaps








Front grille was scrubbed 3 times with APC to try and shift some of the calcium deposits



With all the small details cleaned the vehicle was re-rinsed and washed using the 2BM before being clayed and dried.

Clay came up pretty clean which was surprising



With the vehicle clean and dry I could now properly inspect the paintwork to see what we were dealing with...

Lots of light swirling and marring















Having seen the paint defects out in the sunlight I moved the car inside to take a closer look under the halogens before getting started on the paint correction stage...
















Overall the paintwork was in quite a sorry state considering the vehicle was only a few months old. Just goes to show the level of damage that can be caused through poor washing techniques

I taped up a small test section on the bonnet to try and find a suitable combo for this one. Needless to say this car had some nasty sticky paint and I wound up shredding a nearly new 3M compounding pad along with a 3M polishing pad. At the end of the day I settled on a combo of FA + FCP for the more deeply swirled bits, with FA & SIP being used on the remainder of the vehicle.

Before


50/50


And after



Center of the bonnet corrected with the 50/50 section in the top half of the photo







Paintwork nicely cleaned up and swirl free






Flake coming back to life



Some random shots from around the car





Mirror before


And after



A-Pillar before


And after



Rear fender before




After





Rear C-Pillar before


After



With the paintwork corrected I got stuck into the plastic B-pillars...Let's just say they were trashed!










Due the condition these were in I opted to hit them with FCP before refining with SIP and finally FA

Afters









With all the correction completed I rewashed the car to remove all the polishing dust before tackling all the smaller details.

Exhausts were cleaned up and shined


Missus gave me a hand with the front grille (small fingers FTW). Overall it came up pretty well IMO






LSP for the day (iirc) was Poor-Boys EX sealant topped with a layer of Pete's 53 for some added protection. Trim got 303 Aerospace, tires got Meg's Endurance Gel and windows were cleaned with AG Fast Glass.

Some afters












Some reflection shots






Final one



As always thanks for looking