1998 100,000 mile black Lexus

[Rick]

Well, this turned in to a 7 hour project stretched over the past two days. I wish I had taken some before and after pictures of the interior, it needed help badly. Anyways, this car was my guinea pig for my newly bought DA polisher, and what better color to show results than clear coated black.

The car had several problems. If I had to guess it went through a car wash occasionally, but was never really cared for as I would have. There was a high concentration of bonded contaminants in the paint, especially on the front bumper (more on this in a minute). Ideally the hood and bumper would get repainted and it gets new head lights, but thats not really an option, the car just needed to be made as good as possible to sell. The rock pelting is pretty bad. The paint all over the car shows haze with some varrying scratches in several places.

If your using dial up I suggest continuing here, but if you've got broadband you might follow along in my galley here:
http://www.meguiarsonline.com/gallery/showgallery.php?cat=500&ppuser=193
After you open the tumbnails then click on the medium pictures it will open the full sized 4 mega pixel pictures so you can really appreciate this. Thankyou Meguiars for hosting unlimited space.

Anyways, here's the hood before, notice the haze in it.


And another shot, you can tell the rock chips are pretty bad.


And probably the worst swirls were here:

[Rick]

Scuffs on the front drivers side fender:


More scuffs in rear passenger door:


Headlight with a haze in it, it looked worst in person:

[Rick]

So the Process is as follows:
Mild Clay bar with Final detail for lubricant.
Dual Action Cleaner Polish on DA Polisher with cutting foam pad
NXT Gen Wax on DA polisher with polishing pad
Total time ~ 2 hours on the paint.

I wish for this car I had an aggressive clay bar, but all I had was the mild, but from this picture you can see how much gunk was bonded to the paint. This is just from the front bumper!


The Results:

Here's the hood after the three steps, rock chips can't be fixed, but notice the haze is gone and it's much much glossier:


Down the drivers side, scratches at the top of the fender came out!

[Rick]

Down the passenger side, no more scratches on the top of the door, the verticle scuff was reduced significantly.


Here's that hazed headlight after using clear plastic cleaner and polish with the DA, again nothing it can do about the rock chips, but the haze is gone, it was also clay barred before with the hood.


I wish I had taken before's of the interior. It was so so, but the carpet needed shampoo'd really badly. The leather was starting to dry out some, it soaked up the conditioner I put on it. The dash is done with W dressing. But you get the jist of it from this:


Anyways, I'm very happy with the DA polisher, it makes it so much easier to do everything involving the paint. I can't believe I lasted so long without one. Next now that I had a guinea pig to play with is my own car, so expect some pictures of it here shortly.

[Mike Phillips]

Hi Ricky,

Awesome detail and excellent write-up. Your before and after pictures really tell the story. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate the time and trouble you went through to share this with others.

If it took you 7 hours to do the detail, how long did it take you to,

* Download the pictures on to your computer
* Sort through and pick out the best ones
* Re-name all the good photo's
* Crop and resize for uploading to your gallery
* Upload to your gallery
* Writing an outline of what you did, (Wordsmithing), and then insert the appropriate pictures

Time consuming isn't it?

I'm still working on the Ford Lightning event, and then I have an event from the other weekend ago... no wonder my hard drive is full!

Excellent work, excellent write-up!

Mike

p.s.

I write everything I post to a forum in MSWord first to check for spelling errors and the copy and paste into the message box... more time, but well worth it.

[ebpcivicsi]

Nice work!

It certainly does take a while to transfer pics from the camera, transfer to a host, pick the best pictures, write post, etc. Thanks for sharing.

[Rick]

Well, here's the trick. A usb reader for whatever media type your camera uses is much faster than hooking the camera up to the computer and then using the provided software to download. I have a canon digital elph S400 camera that uses compact flash and I just pop the memory card out and put it in to the reader. It then comes up as a removable storage drive, then it's drag and drop from there. I think I only had about 30 pictures total inside and out so it wasn't too much to sort through.

Still, with the write up and all it probably was about an hour extra. Luckily I had the great idea to copy and paste everything I had initially written in to note pad because I blindly submitted it with all the pictures on one message and it came back with an error message. Your only allowed 3 pictures per reply I think.

And Mike, I too appreciate the length you go to to provide the write ups and pictures you do. I'm just very glad that Meguiars was kind enough to host us unlimited space. And while I'm on that topic is there any chance we could get a page that allows multiple uploads at once rather than just uploading one picture at a time? That was probably the biggest pain of the whole write up.

As far as an after picture of the rear fender I'll have to see if I can get a shot of it. It's been really overcast the last few days, rained some today too so I'll have to wait until the sun comes out again to fully know how good of a job it did. I'll try and snap a picture though when it does.

[Rick]

One other trick I might mention. Resizing the pictures really isn't necessary, the galley does it for you. Simply upload the pictures full size, then go in to your galley and click on the thumbnail of the particular picture your interested in. This will bring up a medium size picture. Right click on it and click properties. It will give you a url that will like the medium sized picture. You can copy and paste this to get that size picture. This is what I did for the posts. You can still go in to my galley and see the full sized ones.

[Airborne Ranger]

Poor Lexus

Ricky to the rescue nice work man!! I'll bet the owner was floored when he/she saw there Lexus afterwards! dm98

[Mike Phillips]

Originally posted by Rick
Resizing the pictures really isn't necessary

Just a note about this....

PhotoPost does resize everyone's photo's automatically, but large picture files take up a lot of space. If we were looking at this forum as something that will be up for a week or two, then it would be no big deal. But when we thing about having a presence forever... then we start to thing about resources.

I will upload my tutorial on cropping, resizing, uploading and inserting photo's tomorrow. Hopefully this will help to set a standard for uploading photo's to the gallery.

Mike

[Teak]

Looking good.

Eric

[Rick]

Actually the car was ours, ad came out in the auto trader tuesday and a guy came and bought it yesterday. First person to come look at it too. So that makes my record 5 of 6 for cars I've detailed being bought by the first person who comes to look at it.

[Rick]

As promised:



This is while the guy was comming back with a check to buy the car. The sun came out for just a few minutes so I could get this picture. It's not perfect, but a heck of a lot better than before. I hope he takes good care of it, it rained today too again, shame. For all I know it'll get washed with dish soap or go through scratch city car washes. Ehh, it's gone, the cashiers check deposited today :p .

[Mike Phillips]

Congrats on the quick sale!

Here's one thing I know, quick sale it good, long drawn out process is bad. I'd rather sell something to the first caller than to have 2 dozen people call, half of them say they're going to come by and never do, and the ones that do come by kick the tires and try to nickel and dime you down....

Congratulation on the quick sale, you just have to know that because you made it look good that helped a lot. People buy on appearance. A nice looking car will always appear to be a better car than a car in the same condition that doesn't look as good.

Mike