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Now is this how a Mercedes CLS 550 should look? No. But hey, it has a nice expensive dealer applied coating that claims you don't have to wax the car for 5 years. That was applied 2 years ago and the whole car looks like this.
The paint code on this car indicates that it is a ceramic clear. If you think all ceramic clears are rock hard, think again. This paint was super soft and hazed quite badly. We played with a wide variety of liquid/pad combos before settling on a process. Ultimate Compound on a yellow foam pad removed the swirls very quickly, but left behind a lot of RIDS while creating a noticeable amount of haze. The DAMF System took care of both but left more haze behind.
The swirls are gone in this shot, but plenty of haze is present.
The haze is reduced here with M205 on a foam finishing pad via DA buffer, but there is still some. For most details, this would be acceptable since a final application of wax would eliminate it and, to be frank, partially hide it. But we wanted more here.
Sometimes, however, you just need to take the DA buffer out of the equation on super soft paint. The mere motion of the tool creates the little tick marks you see above, and it can be quite tricky to eliminate them completely. Sometimes a foam finishing pad with M205 by hand actually performs better. In this case, though, we just pulled out the rotary buffer, set it to the slowest speed, and gently worked some M205 on the foam finishing pad. Voila!
We just got some of these very nifty little 3M pneumatic polishers in the training garage. A 3" backing plate coupled with a 15mm stroke means great defect removal in small areas.
Teamwork!
Brad handles rotary finish polishing duties on the hood.
Oh, geez, what the heck happened to this 2007 Ford pickup? Well, nothing, really. No waxing, no claying, no defect removal. Like we said, nothing really. And that's the problem.
We immediately reached for the C2100 Aggressive Red Clay since it felt like 40 grit sandpaper, then put a DMX5 Xtra Cut microfiber disc on the G110v2, primed it with some D300 and set to work.
Not too shabby for the first pass!
Look at the difference in reflections of the overhead lights; on the right you can see the fluting in the reflector, on the left it's just sort of an undefined bright area.
Time to get Tim working with the above combo.
Now that's much better!!
Or course Paul had to spend some time with the cool new tool. And he did it on his cool, and completely original, first gen Mazda RX-7.
The paint code on this car indicates that it is a ceramic clear. If you think all ceramic clears are rock hard, think again. This paint was super soft and hazed quite badly. We played with a wide variety of liquid/pad combos before settling on a process. Ultimate Compound on a yellow foam pad removed the swirls very quickly, but left behind a lot of RIDS while creating a noticeable amount of haze. The DAMF System took care of both but left more haze behind.
The swirls are gone in this shot, but plenty of haze is present.
The haze is reduced here with M205 on a foam finishing pad via DA buffer, but there is still some. For most details, this would be acceptable since a final application of wax would eliminate it and, to be frank, partially hide it. But we wanted more here.
Sometimes, however, you just need to take the DA buffer out of the equation on super soft paint. The mere motion of the tool creates the little tick marks you see above, and it can be quite tricky to eliminate them completely. Sometimes a foam finishing pad with M205 by hand actually performs better. In this case, though, we just pulled out the rotary buffer, set it to the slowest speed, and gently worked some M205 on the foam finishing pad. Voila!
We just got some of these very nifty little 3M pneumatic polishers in the training garage. A 3" backing plate coupled with a 15mm stroke means great defect removal in small areas.
Teamwork!
Brad handles rotary finish polishing duties on the hood.
Oh, geez, what the heck happened to this 2007 Ford pickup? Well, nothing, really. No waxing, no claying, no defect removal. Like we said, nothing really. And that's the problem.
We immediately reached for the C2100 Aggressive Red Clay since it felt like 40 grit sandpaper, then put a DMX5 Xtra Cut microfiber disc on the G110v2, primed it with some D300 and set to work.
Not too shabby for the first pass!
Look at the difference in reflections of the overhead lights; on the right you can see the fluting in the reflector, on the left it's just sort of an undefined bright area.
Time to get Tim working with the above combo.
Now that's much better!!
Or course Paul had to spend some time with the cool new tool. And he did it on his cool, and completely original, first gen Mazda RX-7.
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