Southern California MG Club at Meguiar's!

[Mike Phillips]

Southern California MG Club at Meguiar's!

[Mike Phillips]

When we hold these classes, we usually try to use a car from the club that matches the namesake of the club, as it worked out, one of the members brought an old Volvo that had been sitting in storage for around 20 years. It was oxidized and filled with gross swirls, so we used it to teach proper detailing techniques for today's class.

Before





After






This was a great class full of enthusiastic car crazy people! Here are the folks that made it all the way to the end...

[Djmigs]

Thank You

Once again this was my second event and i still learned so much from last time..... and thank you for feeding me knowledge, I feel more confident then ever before.... I feel I can now tackle the detailing process... I need to just practice practice...... I was using the DA more and felt comfortable.... Seeing how you use it and the way you detail is an artform and you make it seem so easyyyyy....

It was a very good class you presented, very good... so good I am willing to buy you pizza next time and a soda lol.... By the way anytime you need help (let me know) or feel like working on some cars that are a few years old let me know I have two for you lol....

Thank you for Meguiars Online and thank you Barry Meguiar for giving Mike P the opportunity to shine..... I was once told "Do what you love" cause if you don't, it will show... Thanks Meguiars for offering these types of classes I know no other manufacture that does this...This is a valuebale class....never let this go as well as The MOL form but most importantly Mike P..... I'm sure you don't have to do any of this but you do because you are into cars like us and making high quality products....

i like the motto you have"If we bring a product out it must surpass all other or else we will not bring it out"...and i vouch for that statement first hand.....Thank You To the folks who allowed us to work on there green Volvo(i hope you liked using the g100)....

Mike i use to detail my car but then as the years went by i got lazy.going to your class rejuvinated me and tought me more then i can process lol...i learned so much and i will definately practice everything you taught me i am in debt to you and meguiars...i am a Meguiars User for life from now on....i know have the energy to detail my car but must importantly the right way...


I apologize if I have said anything wrong or misspelled I am just so excited tomorrow I will wake up and start working on my car.Thank You to everyone you all have a great weekend....

Thanks Again Meguiars Team

Cheers,
miguel

[Tom Panagos]

Thanks

Mike,
Thanks for all the good information about keeping our cars looking good. I learned a lot about your products and saw firsthand how they worked on my car.

My car looks great thanks to you and all the others who helped clean up my dingy Volvo.

Tom Panagos
Southern California MG Club

[jdlierle]

Mike,

First off thank you personally for all the hard work, effort, and passion you put into detailing cars and sharing with the public your knowledge. And kudo's to Barry Meguiar to hire you and provide the facility's free of charge to us car enthusiasts. And feeding us (Twice) is nice touch.

The best compliment I can give you Mike, is that my Mom (who is not a car nut or really a car enthusiast, but does car about her car apperance , IE she let's me take care of her car, who came along because we had a engagement later that day) said "that class was better than I thought is was going to be." I had pumped her up about the class for about a month (the autopian detail class which I still hope to attend in a month)

She was thoroughly impressed!!!!

I knew I was going to be because I have read about Mike's reputation on www.autopia.com, a real car nuts appearance site, and Mike is very well respected among the best detailers in the country.

This class is great for people with little or no knowledge, and is also works for the hard core enthusiasts as two professional detailers attended, even one from as far as CO.

It's hard to sum up the experience in a short article, but anyone who likes car, and has a free Saturday, this is a no brainer, go to one of these detail classes. And bring your wife or girlfriend. She'll understand why you need to buy all these products, in fact she might even encourage you to buy more products.

But to make one thing clear. This class is not a sales pitch. Mike does not even try to sale a thing. But if you want to get some of the hard to get items, they are offered at a discount at the end of the day but I REPEAT THIS IS NOT SALES PITCH, but a fun learning class if you want it, or a social gathering for club members with cool cars.


To sum it, it you ever get a chance to go, IT IS A NO BRAINER, GO ASAP, and bring your wife, girlfriend, or family members. And for hardcore guys, Mike takes the time to answers all the questions. And we did talk about non Meguiar products too.

In fact I liked it so much, I hope to repeat it again for the autopian detail day next month, please find a seat for me Mike.

The old MG's and Volvo were certainly cool. The restoration was quite amazing on the Volvo. I got to use a PC for the first time, (passenger side of hood) and although my results were not as good as Mike (DUH) 20 years of experience they weren't bad or horrible. If I practice, read the forums, use the right products, pads, I shoud get good results, but PCs do have limitations. But what that PC did with one product with basically biginners was amaxzing on that car.

Thanks again Mike for both a fun and informative day for me and my mom.

Doug

[Robert Bond]

Hi Mike,
We just wanted to thank you again for the great class yesterday. It was very informative and you made it entertaining as well.
Best Regards,
Bob and Vicki Bond

[Slick]

well... since Mike had to go on about his Honda Pilot, thought I'd get my plug in for the "poor cousin". Here's some rather poor quality pics of my daily driver- an '04 Saturn Vue, in Rainforest Green. It's the "poor cousin" because it's got the same Honda-sourced 3.5L V6 engine & 5 spd auto tranny as the Pilot... it's just dropped into a more pedestrian (and LIGHTER) body- it's surprisingly quick.

the clearcoat seems to be EXTREMELY hard, as I've only put a very few scratches into it in the past year of normal exterior care. It's garaged at night, but sits out baking in the high desert sun all day during the workweek.

I didn't drive it down for the detailing day, as it gets enough "lovin" at home & figured I'd take the Mustang on a top-down cruise back up the coast on the way home (used to live in Huntington Beach).

Many thanks to Mike & Meguiar's... I got exactly what I'd hoped to out of the "clinic"... and I don't mean the pizza!

Randy



the flake really pops in the sun...



here's another... not bad for just regular care/maintenance...

[Mike Phillips]

Here's a fine example of an MGA brought to Meguiar's for the SoCal MG Detailing Class,

[Mike Phillips]

Here's an Austin Healey Sprite,






And here's an MGB,

[Mike Phillips]

Most members chose to drive their non MG-car and for this reason we had a number of interesting vehicles on hand this day...

First was the young lady who brought her BMW to show us the Dealer Installed Swirl Option also known as DISO that is so common to new and used cars purchased through dealerships.




Because of the light color of the paint and the angle of the sun it was hard to capture the full extent of the damage done to the finish of her car, but here are couple of photos that you can easily see the zig-zag pattern caused by the mis-use of a rotary buffer...










We taught this young lady how to use our G100 Dual Action Polisher with the M80 Speed Glaze to remove the swirls herself instead of relying on the dealership to do it right the second time.

[Mike Phillips]

We also had a new Thunderbird,




And a brand spanking new Pontiac Solstice without the dealer installed swirl option!

[Steve_S]

Great photos, thanks! And thank you as well for the fantastic class. I learned a lot about what to do and what not to do, as well as what to stop doing immediately! You run a great workshop and I hope the company recognizes how much the car enthusiast crowd appreciates your hard work.

Companies in all different fields run workshops such as these, but none I have seen have put as much personal effort into making sure the students leave well educated. Instead, most of them concentrate on sales pitches to try and pay for the instructor's salary!

I'm sure you made great sales off this class but it certainly wasn't because of your sales pitch as there was virtually none. You relied on education instead and therefore everyone bought products because they could see the real value in them rather than taking some clown's word for it.

Once again thanks for the great class!

[Mike Phillips]

Like I mentioned at the beginning of this thread, when we hold these classes, we usually try to pick a car from the club that matches the namesake of the club, as it worked out, one of the members brought an old Volvo that had been sitting in storage for around 20 years. It was oxidized and filled with gross swirls, so we used it to teach proper detailing techniques for today's class.

Before


Here's a shot of the sun reflecting straight down on the hood, note my hand is primarily in the picture to help the camera to properly focus for this shot. This picture has not been altered in any way except that I have resized the original down to 600 pixels wide.




Okay now, this is going to hurt your eyes... The below picture is a 600 pixel wide section cropped out of the original photo above. It also has not been altered in any way.



Ouch! that just plain hurts to look at... but we're going to fix the paint on this car and in so doing, teach approximately 30+ people how to remove swirls using their God-given hands and Meguiar's G100 Dual Action Polisher.

[Mike Phillips]

Originally posted by Steve_S
I learned a lot about what to do and what not to do, as well as what to stop doing immediately!

Hi Steve!

Thank you for the kind words and please remember everything at Meguiar's is team work, even during these Saturday classes there are a lot of people behind the scenes doing their part during the week to make these classes successful.

Hold on... I've been playing catch-up all day with e-mail, phone calls and posts on this forum and now it's time to start uploading ALL the photos!

[Mike Phillips]

Here are couple more shots captures with my Sony which is hands down better at capturing swirls than my Canon Rebel, just not at the same high resolution.

Original resized to 600 pixels wide




The below photo was cropped out of the above photo - no resize




And here are a couple more to kind of drive the point home as to how the original finish looks on this original Volvo...