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Like I mentioned this morning, my neighbor wanted me to detail his truck after seeing what I did with my nephew's Grand Am. Well he dropped it off this morning around 8:30 and I got to work. The first thing I did was take the before pictures:
Hood #1 My neighbor and his wife did not realize how much damage had been done to the paint by the previous owner until after they looked at the before pics and saw the swirls in the sunlight.
Hood #2
Wheel and tire
For the rims and tires, I used Megs All Wheel and Tire Cleaner. I took an after pic, but it got lost in the email
But if you look close in this pic, you can see the results of a generous application of AW&TC and a bit of scrubbing
Next I sprayed down the wheel wells with Simple Green at 1:1 and hosed them down with a strong stream from the hose. Up next was the part I was dreading, the roof. Fortunately my neighbor had some scaffolding that we placed across the bed for me to stand on, it gave me a good 2 feet of lift, I'd have hated to have had to do the roof without it.
I had done a test spot on the hood with a yellow polishing pad and Ultimate Polish. It made the paint shiny, but did nothing for the swirls, so I switched to a maroon cutting pad with Ultimate Compound. That truck had some HARD paint on it. I tried 4 passes up/down, left & right and after wiping off the residue, I saw improvement, but nowhere near good enough, so I put 4 more drops of compound on the pad and did another 4 passes. Finally, the results I was looking for. To make a long story short, it took me almost 10-1/2 hours JUST on the paint, between the compounding and the application of Ult Paste Wax. I still have the windows and all the chrome to finish, but my neighbor was so impressed he didn't care that I was going to need the truck another day to finish up.
Here are the afters, unfortunately, we were losing the sun by this time and I don't have any direct sun shots, but the pics I was able to take turned out pretty good:
Hood #1 My neighbor and his wife did not realize how much damage had been done to the paint by the previous owner until after they looked at the before pics and saw the swirls in the sunlight.
Hood #2
Wheel and tire
For the rims and tires, I used Megs All Wheel and Tire Cleaner. I took an after pic, but it got lost in the email
But if you look close in this pic, you can see the results of a generous application of AW&TC and a bit of scrubbingNext I sprayed down the wheel wells with Simple Green at 1:1 and hosed them down with a strong stream from the hose. Up next was the part I was dreading, the roof. Fortunately my neighbor had some scaffolding that we placed across the bed for me to stand on, it gave me a good 2 feet of lift, I'd have hated to have had to do the roof without it.
I had done a test spot on the hood with a yellow polishing pad and Ultimate Polish. It made the paint shiny, but did nothing for the swirls, so I switched to a maroon cutting pad with Ultimate Compound. That truck had some HARD paint on it. I tried 4 passes up/down, left & right and after wiping off the residue, I saw improvement, but nowhere near good enough, so I put 4 more drops of compound on the pad and did another 4 passes. Finally, the results I was looking for. To make a long story short, it took me almost 10-1/2 hours JUST on the paint, between the compounding and the application of Ult Paste Wax. I still have the windows and all the chrome to finish, but my neighbor was so impressed he didn't care that I was going to need the truck another day to finish up.
Here are the afters, unfortunately, we were losing the sun by this time and I don't have any direct sun shots, but the pics I was able to take turned out pretty good:
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