This is my brothers FRC. He bought it in August of 05 with 8500 miles on it, now it shows 15k miles.
Last time it got any love was in fall of '05. I clayed and zaino'd it. So it was ready for a real detail this time.
My brother and my dad drove the car up from FL. When they arrive it looked like this:
Light swirls:
The surface also had some light scratches that most likely came from the use of a water blade. :ack2:
Very hard to capture defects on the paint.
This would be the first car that I would detail myself with the new metabo, edge wool and adapter. I love this setup, it is so darn smooth. I polished the car 2.5 times with the various steps and did not feel as beat up like I always do after a detail.
I first started with:
Green edge wool, presta 1500 and metabo rotary at 1500.
After 1 pass this seemed to remove 70% of the minor swirls, but did nothing for the minor scratches. The gloss was much improved. Two more passes with this setup and most of the minor scratches were gone.
So I decided to step up to:
Black edge wool, presta 1500 and metabo rotary at 1500.
I followed with:
Green edge wool, presta 1500 and metabo rotary at 1500.
This remove 90% of the minor scratches which maybe where not so minor, at least on the PITA vette clear nothing seems minor.
This is what the car looked like in the garage after the wool polishing:
Pardon the ladder as my dad was installing some additional electrical outlets in the garage for me. He installed 6 new outlets, ran three runs of 12 ga. wire for each pair of outlets and installed a 20amp breaker for each pair. No more worries about running the mytee extractor and multiable fans at the same time.This side of the garage had no outlets prior to this install.
We then backed the car out to check for buffer trails and holograms in the bright sun. On this light blue color we could only see a few:
There where a few holograms on the hood, but I could not get them to show up:
To clean up the paint, for a final polish I used:
ZPC/green P2 pad/metabo rotary at 1500. Had to use a valcro backing plate but it was still very smooth. As uaual 3-4 small pea sized dots of ZPC on the pad with a spritz of Z6.
At the same time my brother vac'd the interior, cleaned the seats with Z9 and wiped down the rest of the interior. He also appled ZAIO to the wheels.
This is what the car looked like after ZPC:
The car needs washed to remove the wool shedding and some dust from the seams. But its 7pm and time to call it a day. I started at 11am had a long lunch hour and we helped my dad with the wiring a few times. So I had about 6 hours in the car so far.
So at 9am the next morning (sat) we washed the car with Z7 and dried with a few WW towels.
Next I applied:
3x of ZFX Z2pro.
My brother applied a coat of Z2pro to the wheels.
Each application was removed by a spritz of Z6 on each panel then wiped down with a MF. I applied the Z2pro so thin that I don't think I used 1/2 oz to do the 3 coats.
The car was really looking great at this point. It's around 11:30am and we had a pool party to attend and didn't want to mess with the car when we returned home that evening.
So I called Sal (he answered of course on a Saturday) and asked if we would be getting into "product overload" if we applied Clear Seal to the car now. Usually I would wait till later that day or the next to apply CS over that many applications of Z2/5pro. Sal said that I might, but give it a try and let him know how it works. I knew that if the CS smeared I could remove it with a Z6 wipedown.
So I applied Clear Seal to the paint, trim and glass. In less then 15 mins the Clear Seal was dried everywhere that I had applied it. I used my brinkman to looked over the car and could not find any areas where CS had not dried. The paint looked like it had more gloss after the CS. No streaking was visible at all. So I decided to push it a little more and also applied Z8 to the paint and glass. As usualy Z8 just brings the paint to another level. Again I had no streaking at all.
My brother applied Z-16 to the tires with a tire swipe while I did the Z8. This was his first time using Z-16, I told him to apply it thick and let it dry on its own. As usual this worked great.
So we backed the car out for some pics. There were some clouds and after I got the shade shots under the trees. We had to wait for the clouds to pass by.
Pics taken between 1:15-1:30pm. The sun was high in the sky when it finally came out from the clouds.
