Tweet
Pictures from Thursday Night Open Garage - May 6th, 2010
Back to back TNOGs!!
We had sort of an extreme makeover last night in the form of Nissan Sentra coupe that does double duty as daily driver and full on track rat for Andy. The interior is gutted and the car is outfitted with a racing bucket, full harness, tow hooks, and all the requisite exterior cut off switches needed for hard core track time. Needless to say, all that track duty takes a toll on the paint, and Andy's less than passionate dedication to the finish didn't help. The paint was hammered. But by the end of the night Andy was stunned with the turnaround.
Here are a couple of shots from when the car rolled in. Hardly a reflection to be found!
Yes, the car was washed just the day before, but we still wiped it down and started claying. It kind of needed it.
We did a little test spot on the hood with a G110v2, Ultimate Compound and a W8207 Soft Buff 2.0 pad. Yep, that'll do nicely.
Andy had never held a buffer before so we have him a few pointers and turned him loose. Of course, he had the A-Team backing him up!
While the A-Team was attacking the Nissan we had other things to deal with. How about a set of wheels with brake dust just caked into the edges of the spoke? The owner hadn't been able to get rid of this so we took some aggressive red clay to the affected areas - and the owner spent the entire evening doing just this!!
The spoke just to the right of top center has been cleaned up with the red clay, the spoke to the left of top center still needs to be addressed. It was tedious work, but it cleaned the wheels up beautifully.
At the same time Brian was buffing out the roof and trunk of his Corvette. Apparently he had left a stop light a bit too quickly on the way over and lost his tail lights! Actually, he had removed them so he could buff those out too..... which nobody managed to capture on camera.
Mike Pennington hung around for a while and gave some pointers on using the G110v2.
And we worked by hand to remove some heavy swirls from a 9 month old Honda Civic. The paint was incredibly soft on this car and Ultimate Compound just overwhelmed it. We got rid of the swirls easily enough, but the paint was noticeably hazed after using UC. So we stepped down to SwirlX and that cleared up most of the hazing. A follow up pass with more SwirlX but a very light touch did the trick. Very delicate, scratch sensitive paint can be frustrating to work on, but adjusting your technique is critical to achieving a great finish.
There is a single little RID still present here but the tiny little flecks you see is actually the metal flake in the paint, not dust, not pits. And certainly no swirls, and this car was a mess before we started.
This is the rear 1/4 panel of one of our employees cars. Basically just another opportunity for me to take a picture of Bob's gorgeous Victory Red Camaro!
Back to the Nissan and work is progressing nicely. You can even see Andy's reflection in the hood. By the way, there are three guys named Andy working on the car is this picture. And you thought there were a lot of Mikes around here!
Here Bob demonstrates cleaning a pad on the fly because.....
....they really needed cleaning!!
Bob finds more uses for the 4" polishing pad, this time closing in on the washer nozzles.
Hey, John can see himself in the side of the car now!
Finishing up and the paint has been transformed.
The Nissan track car A-Team (l-r): John, Mike, Andy, Andy, Jesse, Bob. And they worked on the car from 5:30 to 8:00PM. Amazing what 5 guys can do in 2.5 hours!
A final head shot.
Once again, a huge thank you to John (ClearlyCoated) and Andy (bmrfan) for handling camera duties for us, and of course to everyone who helped out and shared their knowledge - Jesse, Andy, Paul, Bob, Brian.... you guys rock!!
! I really need to make it back out to the TNOG, it's been years since I've been to one 
.
Comment