Pictures from Thursday Night Open Garage - September 29th, 2011
We had a really busy TNOG last night with some fun projects and car owners eager to learn how to properly take care of the finish on their vehicle. We also had something very interesting show up, and quite frankly we weren't quite sure how the owner should proceed with caring for his artwork. Our products aren't really designed for the type of paint he uses in his paintings, so a bit of experimentation was in order. Fortunately, he brought an extra canvas to experiment on.
Here are a few close ups of his painting:
And here is the complete canvas, with one side representing the road use of the car and the other side representing the track day use (yes, the owner tracks this car regularly!):
Here's a quick shot of the owner experimenting on a test canvas. He used a variety of liquids and pads, ultimately looking for a combination that would allow him to clean up the surface without leveling off the brush strokes or, worse, taking all the paint off!
Of course we had more traditional work to do - things like swirl removal, headlight cleaning, etc.
Here a former Saturday Class attendee picks up some pointers for working on her Porsche Boxster.
Some fine detail work on the front bumper of this 3 Series. We suggested taping off the black plastic trim, not realizing it could just be removed and reinstalled so easily!
A bit of heavy duty headlight restoration going on. This lens really didn't look all that bad compared to some we've seen, but it was surprisingly stubborn so we had to resort a more aggressive process than originally anticipated.
This is how it looked when we started:
And this is the end result:
Lots of other activity going through the evening.....
Buffing out the clear coat over carbon fiber.....
.... full of swirls to start with.....
... and no more swirls following a little Ultimate Compound on the DA.
This is what a car owner starts to do shortly after being shown just how good their paint can actually look. Not 10 before this shot was taken she said that she thought the paint looked pretty darn good. But now, after a bit of buffing to remove the swirls, she starts getting nit-picky about things. How quickly perceptions can change, and in our book that's a good thing!
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