Some of you may know by now that I am rather fond of my Porsches, so when the owner of this one dropped in by a couple of months ago with a view to booking it in it goes without saying that I was rather looking forward to it
The car by the owners own admission has had a hard life up to now, it's done over 90,000 miles, gets driven daily (even in winter) and pretty much every panel on the car has been painted at some point (to be fair 95% of it was done well although the after prep left a lot to be desired which we'll see in a minute!). He basically thought that most of the car was going to need a re-paint but I told him to leave the car with us for a week and hopefully by the end he'd be pleasantly surprised :thumb:
Anyways, enough of the blurb - let?s see some before shots:
One tired looking 911:
Someone's cat obviously likes to go for walks over the bonnet:
Couple of bird bombs:
Very "milky" looking paintwork in places:
The "big reds" were looking more a sad pinky colour!
The interior was pretty grubby in places too:
First job was to remove the wheels to clean the arches properly:
For some reason I don?t have an after pic at this stage

but you'll see later on that they were actually done :lol:
The wheels were put back on but not cleaned yet as the sealant I was going to use can't get wet for several hours so they would get done once the car was inside.
So, APC through the foam lance at a temperature of approx 60/70 degrees:
Then rinsed off thoroughly:
APC was then applied and agitated with Raceglaze Detailing brushes to clean all exterior trim/badge/shuts etc:
Engine bay was cleaned with Meguiars Super Degreaser:
Not the most exciting engine to look at really!
The car was then washed with the 2 bucket method, Autosmart Tardis was used to remove some large tar deposits and then Iron Cut was applied to remove any iron contamination - no pics of this stage as it was really heavy with rain by now.
Inside, the car was clayed with Meguiars Mild which removed a little bit of contamination but not a huge amount:
After drying with PB towels and the Black Baron I turned my attention back to the wheels:
Process was as follows:
- Gloss-It wheel gel (4:1)
- Autosmart Tardis
- Iron Cut
- IPA wipe down
- Nanolex Professional Sealant
Unfortunately, the wheels had all been refurbished at some point and while the faces were pretty good the inner rims were really rough and a lot of dirt was trapped under the clear
They came up pretty well considering:
However, you can see where old weight residue had been painted over:
Seriously, how difficult would it be just to give the
whole wheel a clean before painting?? This is one of the things that frustrates me the most and it's probably the same for detailers up and down the country.