Tweet
Pictures from Thursday Night Open Garage - October 13th, 2011
The evening started out looking like it was going to be very quiet, but we ended up with quite a few things going on and had a blast in the process.Ralf brought his Challenger R/T "Lucky Girl" back in for some additional tutoring on bringing the paint to its maximum potential prior to the car being on display at SEMA. We used the DA Microfiber System on the trunk lid as a started, and decided to skip the finishing wax in favor of some M205 via rotary with a foam finishing pad, and then topping it all off with Ultimate Wax paste, hand applied. Everyone agreed that this gave a dramatic improvement to the finish.
After going over the proper technique for using D300 on the microfiber cutting disc, we turned Ralf loose on the rest of the trunk.
We followed up the heavy correction step with M205/rotary.
Ever helpful, Paul jumped into the game with a 4" polishing pad and some Ultimate Compound to correct the rear spoiler.
Our final reflection shot of the trunk lid. the orange peel you see in the reflection of the ceiling lights is actually in the sign itself, not the paint on the car!
It's getting dark pretty early these days!
Nick helps out with some swirls and water spots on a carbon fiber hood.
What do you do with original single stage red on a 1990 Miata? Well, when it's been hit by a sprinkler, it's badly oxidized and dried out, and just lacking gloss, you experiment a bit. And so we did.
We did a bit of M105 on the rotary, but the paint was so dry it gummed up on us. So we moved down to M80 on the rotary and started to make some serious headway. But since the car owner only uses a DA we tried a couple of things there, too. Interestingly, D300 on a foam polishing pad gave a good, long buffing cycle and great correction. We followed that with D301 on a foam finishing pad.
Here's a half & half of the hood.
It still needs some work, but this is a huge improvement over what we started with, and this was with a very quick pass of D300. Further experimentation will likely reveal that a second pass of D300 followed by some M07 Show Car Glaze prior to waxing with NXT 2.0 or Ultimate Wax yields the best overall finish. But in all honesty, this paint is fairly beat up after a couple decades of neglect, and the owner plans on using it for track days. A concours finish was not the goal, nor is it really in the cards for this car. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be given the best shine it can obtain! It's all about perspective and expectations.
Comment