`17 370z & My Love/Hate Relationship with Essence

richy

New member
I had this car booked for a while and the customer was gracious enough to let me bump his slot a few times, so I took care of him by doing his windshield for free with Forte. This is a brand new Nissan 370z Nismo edition. Glorious. Gorgeous. Pick whatever "G" word you want, it was breathtaking. To be honest, when I first looked at it I thought "How am I going to improve this?" as that`s always my goal. You can decide whether I actually did or not. I`m not telling what the customer said, LOL.

Anyway, here it is as it arrived. This was my 4th car directly in a row during my week off. My shoulder hurts, my knee hurts...this full time detailing is not easy!! Makes me seem like a wuss only doing it once a week!!




















First up was the wheels. The faces and barrels were lightly shot with Zep Citrus and then washed with Megs HW. The tires were cleaned with Zep 505 and the wells with LATA. This was to be a wheels-off, Finest detail, so they would be more intensively cleaned upon being removed.


Next up was decontamination. I could see little black dots on the rear surfaces so rather than the usual one stage of decon, I gave it two. I liberally sprayed IronX to the entire car and then even more where it was the worst. Here it is in action:








The car was then washed with IronX paste and a wash mitt followed by a regular wash using Megs HW. It was then brought inside and clayed with a clay towel.


Now it was time to pull the wheels. After finding the proper torque specs in the manual, it was safe to proceed. Each wheel was pulled and the barrel was intensively cleaned with DG Squeaky Clean as was the caliper. I`m telling you that you don`t have it clean until you`ve used this product. Check out how gorgeous the caliper looks only after being cleaned with SC:





Once chemically cleaned, the barrel, face and caliper were all double coated with CQF. The front wells were coated (at no cost-I throw it in if someone wants the wheels done) with Dlux. Once I re-installed the wheel and before lowering it to the ground, I shot the tire with Opti Bond from my small paint gun. Here is a wheel in progress:

















All done:






Now onto my love/hate relationship with Essence. I love it but it drives me crazy...wait...I should marry it!!!! LMAO!! I had such great luck with the last 3 cars using it with a yellow B/S pad and doing the double wipe. It would leave smudges in the paint that had to be gone over again to remove. Slow speed, fast speed, Slow Arm, Fast Arm, yellow pad, white pad...NOTHING WORKED! In the end, I ditched it and went over the hood with M205 and my cleaned yellow B/S pad + 3401 and got stellar results. The hood had a few very light marks so I hit those with black TB wool + M100 to quickly and effectively get rid of them. The rest of the car was done with M205. The chrome exhaust tips were hand polished with M205. I even polished the glass with M205.

The customer was working midnights while I was doing this car, so it got delivered at night, so I left it in the garage for him to see with all the lighting.

Check out the next 2 shots. Both are exactly the same except for focus. The first is on the flake and the 2nd on the LED light above:








Here she is all done:
























































Thanks for looking. Comments always appreciated.
 
Re: `17 370z & My Love/Hate Relationship with Essence

Great work
I like the red accents around the car. And you definitely improved the looks!

Sent from my SM-G900P using Tapatalk
 
After owning 3 370zs I can tell you the paint is very soft. I never tried Essence on mine. The best polish was the Rupes yellow(I can never remember the names) on the Rupes yellow pad. Works great. Don`t try the Rupes white with the white pad. For whatever reason it doesn`t work right, at least never did for me. Essence seems to like harder clear coats. Great work. I love the 370z, but I`m waiting on the next Z car before I buy another. Prices are low right now for a fun car.
 
Richy --
Quote - "I love it but it drives me crazy...wait...I should marry it!!!! LMAO!!" End Quote

Mi Canadian Amigo - if you ever start doing Stand Up Comedy, I will be first in line to buy a ticket !!! :)
And it will be a lot easier on your body - bonus - !!! :)

Beautiful, perfect, Detail !
I will look up DuraGloss Squeaky Clean.. Thanks for the update..

There is no nicer 370Z NISMO around !
Thank you for all that hard work, killing a few more cigars, and then the pics, editing, and posting up..

This man is a Machine !
Dan F
 
Great work!

Great work
I like the red accents around the car. And you definitely improved the looks!

Sent from my SM-G900P using Tapatalk
Thanks Mike! It`s funny you mention the red accents. Those and the gray trim REALLY got improved. They actually seemed kinda dull before. The customer noticed right away. I remember the original ones way back when. My high school swim coach had one.

Great work as always Richy!
Thanks so much Marc for commenting and for taking the time to do so!

Awesome as usual!!! Very nice...and now you have me interested in squeaky clean!
Buddy, I will NOT coat a barrel without it. You can use it on the paint too, although I usually don`t just to save time. Long story short on SC: I had Duragloss develop it for me and then we ended up putting it into Beta testing and it became a product for them. It was incredible to be part of that journey; something completely new for me. If you`re interested in more about the story, I can link the original write up I did on the `Geek. SC was specifically designed ONLY to be used to precede a coating. That`s it.

After owning 3 370zs I can tell you the paint is very soft. I never tried Essence on mine. The best polish was the Rupes yellow(I can never remember the names) on the Rupes yellow pad. Works great. Don`t try the Rupes white with the white pad. For whatever reason it doesn`t work right, at least never did for me. Essence seems to like harder clear coats. Great work. I love the 370z, but I`m waiting on the next Z car before I buy another. Prices are low right now for a fun car.
I`ve never tried the Rupes polishes, but Essence sure did not like this paint, that`s for sure!!

Richy --
Quote - "I love it but it drives me crazy...wait...I should marry it!!!! LMAO!!" End Quote

Mi Canadian Amigo - if you ever start doing Stand Up Comedy, I will be first in line to buy a ticket !!! :)
And it will be a lot easier on your body - bonus - !!! :)

Beautiful, perfect, Detail !
I will look up DuraGloss Squeaky Clean.. Thanks for the update..

There is no nicer 370Z NISMO around !
Thank you for all that hard work, killing a few more cigars, and then the pics, editing, and posting up..

This man is a Machine !
Dan F
Dan, thank you my friend! We`ve been around these forums a long time, eh?? You know from experience I have a very warped sense of humour, and I do like to share it when I`m doing a write up. In fact I was disappointed nobody caught (or at least commented on) my reference in the title to the 77 Alfa that I did!!
 
Great work, Richy! Love that car and love that color!!!

I had some issues with Essence at first but after seeing the tips and tweaking things it`s been great ever since.
 
Back
Top