Another great turnout for TNOG, and some interesting projects for the evening.
Charlston's Prius was in need of some general cleanup and he wanted to give Ultimate Wash & Wax Anywhere a go. This definitely looks too dirty for a regular quick detailer mist & wipe product, but it's no match for UWWA.
This is the rear spoiler area of the Prius - again, dirtier than you'd want to tackle with a regular mist & wipe product.
UWWA cleaned it nicely, with no scratching. The wispy looking white areas are cloud reflections, not anything actually in the paint.
Proper use of the microfiber towel when using UWWA. This "zebra striping" is what you should end up with as you use slightly different parts of the towel for each wipe, and then you use a second clean towel for the final wipe.
Allen brought his Acura RSX down for a quick clean up as he has a prospective buyer coming to look at it the next day. It was in desperate need of a clay treatment but we couldn't spend a ton of time cleaning the car up, so we opted for a great one-step stand by: M66. We ran it on a W8207 foam polishing pad with the G110v2 set at speed 5 and it worked wonders on the finish! It was great to see a bunch of the guys chipping in to help Allen with the claying!
See, we told you it needed to be clayed!
As is so often the case, we spilled out into the parking lot to work on multiple cars.
Mario brought this very cool little Mini Cooper panel van in because he was having some issues getting the paint to cooperate. It's an older single stage respray and it's in pretty tough shape. M105 was drying up badly, which is what can happen when trying to use that product on a very dried out paint. He was looking for some suggestions so we went for So1o (M86) and it worked great!
This is pretty indicative of how the paint looked all over the car.
Picking up a bead of M86 - we taped off the edges since we were running a rotary buffer for this test.
Mario is keeping a close eye on the progress........
This is how the paint looked before we started with the rotary, wool pad and M86.
This is what we got on our test spot - talk about an improvement in clarity!
Left side is after, right side is before. The reflection of the overhead fluorescent lights is nicely refined in our test spot on the left, and Mario now has a solid plan for finishing the car.
Staying with the red paint theme for a moment we move onto Marc's Civic Si with cat scratches on the hood (along with some swirls, thrown in for good measure).
We pulled out the DA Microfiber Correction System and did a quick test spot. We hear all the time about how super soft and delicate Honda paint is, and we've seen for ourselves just how soft and delicate the paint on the Civic can be. But not on this car. It wasn't hard either - it was pretty middle of the road, actually. And really not delicate at all since even the DAMF system left zero haze after compounding. We easily could have gone straight to wax if we'd wanted to.
Here's the paint after just compounding with the DAMF System. The cat scratches are gone and there's no haze. This shot is focused directly on the paint and not on the reflection of the lights - had we focused on the lights you couldn't tell for sure that the swirls and scratches were gone.
Marc then finished off the hood with D300 and the microfiber cutting disc.
But he then wanted to take the paint to another level so he followed up with M205 Ultra Finishing Polish on a W9207 foam finishing pad.
For the final step, Marc applied Ultimate Wax paste via 4" pad on the G110v2.
Back over to Allen's RSX: Looking really good, especially when you consider this was done with nothing more than M66!
As Allen puts the finishing touches on the RSX we just had to grab a shot of the gloss on the side of the car.
Last up for the evening was Neal's Honda (we didn't plan an import night - honest!!). He bought this car from his uncle who washed it regularly but never waxed it, never clayed it, and never even dried it after washing. This is what neglected paint looks like after almost 20 years, and it's not pretty!
Close up and it looks even worse. In fact, there's a lot of checking in the paint caused by engine heat, and that can't be fixed without repainting the hood, but the rest of this nastiness should at least be made to look somewhat better. Oh, and this shot is after claying the hood - as bad as this looks, it actually felt really smooth.
Once again, however, it's the DA Microfiber System to the rescue! Amazing!
You can clearly see the test spot, and Neal was really excited to see this.
OK, time to put the buffer in Neal's hands and make sure he's got the technique down right to maximize efficiency and results.
Once he got the hang of the tool we let him go on the hood, and this is what he achieved. What an amazing improvement!
Of course it isn't flawless, this paint will never be flawless again, but compared to what it was, this is pretty fantastic. Nicely done, Neal!
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