Richard Grasa
New member
My customer took his '08 535i through a local car wash tunnel to get the winter salt and sand off of it. After taking the car through the wash a total of 3 times, some major damage was inflicted to the jet black paint. The car has under 20k miles on it and before going through this car wash, only had normal hand wash induced marring and for a 6 year old black BMW, looked pretty good. My job was to get the paint back into that good condition, and if I could stay within budget, make it look even better than it did before going through the automatic wash. After a couple test spots, I found the paint on this car was not the typical butter soft jet black alot of us are used to, it was actually on the hard side. I decided to go with one pass of M100 over the entire car and then concentrate with a few more passes on the areas that were damaged by the abrasive, spinning car wash brushes, which was mostly confined to the front and rear bumpers and a bit along the lower sides of the car. I used my Rupes 21 with a Rupes MF Cutting pad for this step. The M100/MF combo finished down nearly LSP ready, not what I was expecting on jet black but I'll take it! I decided to go with HD Speed as my final polish via the Rupes 21 and a white LC pad. I went with Speed as I was sure it would remove any very light marring left from the M100 and also leave a slick, glossy, and protected finish in one step. Being able to do the finish polish/LSP in one step meant I could spend a little more time on the correction and still stay within the customer's budget. The result was 100% correction of the car wash damage, and about 90% correction of the pre-existing swirls and RIDS. The pictures below speak for themselves.
A few 50/50 shots of the car wash damage on the rear bumper:
50/50 of the swirls on the front fender:
And some after shots. Unfortunately the sun was going down when I was done.
Thanks for looking! And stay away from those car wash tunnels!!
A few 50/50 shots of the car wash damage on the rear bumper:
50/50 of the swirls on the front fender:
And some after shots. Unfortunately the sun was going down when I was done.
Thanks for looking! And stay away from those car wash tunnels!!
