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Pictures from August 21st, 2010
Wow, what a fantastic class this was - the enthusiasm you all brought was incredible!! And some of the cars were pretty spectacular too!
When Jack Roush gets hold of a Mustang, this happens!
No ordinary C-Class Benz, this - it's a C63 AMG!
Following the classroom portion of the day we headed to the garage to put this new found knowledge to practical use. Dale was kind enough to let us use his C6 Corvette. A brave man indeed!
We start out by evaluating the paint - feeling it with our hands to determine the presence of above surface bonded contaminants.....
.... and visually inspecting, under strong light, to see if any below surface defects were present.
Since the paint felt a bit rough to the touch we grabbed some clay and got to work removing those bonded contaminants.
And then the real fun started. As we typically do at these classes, we sectioned off part of the hood to do a couple of test spots - one by hand, one with the G110v2. Here we get ready to start a hand application of Ultimate Compound.
This is how NOT to hold your applicator pad when working by hand. This leads to pressure points and uneven working of the product. On delicate paints this will even lead to trails being left in the paint by your fingertips.
You want that pad further down toward the base of your fingers so you can spread the pressure more uniformly across the pad. Secure it a bit with your thumb if need be.
We followed the Ultimate Compound with an application of Deep Crystal Polish and then finished off with NXT Generation Tech Wax 2.0. Here, the DC Polish is about to go on.
While the wax was drying on the hand application test spot, we moved on to the G110v2 with a W8207 Soft Buff 2.0 polishing pad and Ultimate Compound. Notice how flat the pad is against the paint - pressure is being applied with the left hand directly over the pad, while the right hand is simply guiding the buffer and not applying any real pressure at all.
Here we're using some heavy pressure to concentrate on a nasty etching from a bird dropping. The initial pass made a noticeable improvement, but we wanted it gone, not just reduced in appearance. We're still using a 7" W8207 polishing pad, still using Ultimate Compound, and still running the G110v2 on speed 5. Nothing out of the ordinary here, except for the increase in pressure.
Here's the etching mark before we started - along with some swirls and water spots thrown in for good measure!
After our initial pass you can still see a faint outline of the etching. At this point some people actually struggled to see it all.
After our second, more aggressive pass, this is the spot where the etching used to be.
Overall, these are the results we got. The hand application test spot is on the left, the G110v2 test spot on the right. You can see that the swirl marks are virtually gone and that the color is darker and more vibrant that the untreated areas. Now, we've all seen worse swirls than this, but these were bad enough to detract from the appearance of this Corvette. We aren't too worried about the traces of swirls at the top of the test spot because only the edge of the pad ever touched there - subsequent overlapping work will remove those. You may notice that the hand application side appears to be a bit darker, and that's due to the fact that we applied Deep Crystal Polish only to the hand application side. Remember, we consider a pure polish to be an optional step, so we opted out on the machine applied side. Something tells us that, on this car and this paint, we'd probably use a pure polish to achieve the maximum gloss possible when doing a full buff out program.
We then pulled the car back into the garage and let Dale get a feel for the G110v2 on his car, and then we let several other attendees do the same.
We again want to thank Dale for the generous use of his Corvette for demo purposes, Gabrielle for being our photographer for the day, and Sean for making the trip half way around the world (he lives in Johannesburg, South Africa!!) to attend.
Thanks for the great class. I really appreciate you removing the bird etching which had been there about a year. I didn't know how to get it off without doing more damage. The autocross cone rash was the same story, I didn't know how to make it any better. I used clear coat safe rubbing compound by hand and you saw the results, not good. Thanks for teaching us the proper way to make a well used car look new again.
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