The weathermen promised no rain and a bit of sun, so we brought the canopy, coats and halogen light out with us! The detail today is a Peugeot 306 HDI, used as a workhorse so the scooby can stay indoors. Still, even if it's not the main car you've still got to look good right?
Rob wanted a full machine polish on the beast and this is how we did it!
We started off in the usual manner of taking paint depth readings. Averaging 145um accross most of the car bar a wing that had 220um, an obvious sign of a respray. This was plenty for us to work with so we carried on.
The cleaning stage begins with a good blast from the jetwash..........
..........followed by a couple of washes using the Gilmour Gun, Lambs Wool Wash Mitts & nice orange buckets!
From there we moved onto the door & boot shuts, spraying them with Meguiars APC from the spray bottle. These were wiped using microfibres and rinsed down with the jetwash on trickle.
The alloys came next, cleaned with a long brush for the insides and some more microfibres for the alloy face. Meguiars Super Degreaser was the weapon of choice for this.
This is the colour of the rinse bucket after the initial washes.
Now it was claybar time! Meguiars Overspray Clay Mild in a lovely blue was used. Here's Harry posing as we forgot to take a pic of it during mid clay!
The upwards facing panels (bonnet, roof etc) were pretty bad, given the total lack of wax on the car when we got it, it's not suprising it had picked up some contaminents. The car was washed again using the process above after we had finished.
Thankfully we didn't pay attention to Mr Weatherman as we were prepared for the inevitable rain, which decided to start just as we were about to dry the car! Here's our rather sturdy way of keeping us and the car out of the bad weather. Take that rain!
The car was dried with the rather nice Sonus Der Wunder Drying Towels and a pump spray full of Meguiars Last Touch.
We were now left with a bit of a nightmare when swirls, or in this case scratches, are concerned. It has to have being one of the worst uniformly scratched cars we've done! Here's some evidence!
Knowing we had a good amount of paint on the car and the fact it looked like it had being cleaned by the previous owners with a brillo pad, we set off getting the best polish/pad combo, settling on our favourite Meg's #83 with the yellow Sonus SFX pad. Here's Harry in action! Remember to keep the cable out of the way folks!
The next several hours were taken up by both of us going over the whole car using this combination.
This pic shows a wierd scratch (or rather lots of scratches) over the rear arch and the result after we had worked on it.
We like to get plenty of sun reflection 'post polish' shots to show the difference but it was in and out all the time, coupled with the fact it was low in the sky, we had trouble getting a decent non-blury pic. This is all we had that shows up the paint condition afterwards.
Near the end now! All the was left to do was to wax the car (we chose P21s for this), collonite the alloys, dress the tyres and rubber/plastic trim and clean the glass! Meg's #38 for the trim, Autoglym Tyre dressing for the tyres and Meg's Glass Cleaner for the glass.
Once all this was done we went around the car with the fine soft brushes removing any residue from the panel gaps and shuts.
Around 8 hours in total (inc a noodle lunch!) and we were done. By this time the sun had decided to show itself so we grabbed the chance to get some pics!
Enjoy!
Thanks for reading!
Rob wanted a full machine polish on the beast and this is how we did it!
We started off in the usual manner of taking paint depth readings. Averaging 145um accross most of the car bar a wing that had 220um, an obvious sign of a respray. This was plenty for us to work with so we carried on.
The cleaning stage begins with a good blast from the jetwash..........
..........followed by a couple of washes using the Gilmour Gun, Lambs Wool Wash Mitts & nice orange buckets!
From there we moved onto the door & boot shuts, spraying them with Meguiars APC from the spray bottle. These were wiped using microfibres and rinsed down with the jetwash on trickle.
The alloys came next, cleaned with a long brush for the insides and some more microfibres for the alloy face. Meguiars Super Degreaser was the weapon of choice for this.
This is the colour of the rinse bucket after the initial washes.
Now it was claybar time! Meguiars Overspray Clay Mild in a lovely blue was used. Here's Harry posing as we forgot to take a pic of it during mid clay!
The upwards facing panels (bonnet, roof etc) were pretty bad, given the total lack of wax on the car when we got it, it's not suprising it had picked up some contaminents. The car was washed again using the process above after we had finished.
Thankfully we didn't pay attention to Mr Weatherman as we were prepared for the inevitable rain, which decided to start just as we were about to dry the car! Here's our rather sturdy way of keeping us and the car out of the bad weather. Take that rain!
The car was dried with the rather nice Sonus Der Wunder Drying Towels and a pump spray full of Meguiars Last Touch.
We were now left with a bit of a nightmare when swirls, or in this case scratches, are concerned. It has to have being one of the worst uniformly scratched cars we've done! Here's some evidence!
Knowing we had a good amount of paint on the car and the fact it looked like it had being cleaned by the previous owners with a brillo pad, we set off getting the best polish/pad combo, settling on our favourite Meg's #83 with the yellow Sonus SFX pad. Here's Harry in action! Remember to keep the cable out of the way folks!
The next several hours were taken up by both of us going over the whole car using this combination.
This pic shows a wierd scratch (or rather lots of scratches) over the rear arch and the result after we had worked on it.
We like to get plenty of sun reflection 'post polish' shots to show the difference but it was in and out all the time, coupled with the fact it was low in the sky, we had trouble getting a decent non-blury pic. This is all we had that shows up the paint condition afterwards.
Near the end now! All the was left to do was to wax the car (we chose P21s for this), collonite the alloys, dress the tyres and rubber/plastic trim and clean the glass! Meg's #38 for the trim, Autoglym Tyre dressing for the tyres and Meg's Glass Cleaner for the glass.
Once all this was done we went around the car with the fine soft brushes removing any residue from the panel gaps and shuts.
Around 8 hours in total (inc a noodle lunch!) and we were done. By this time the sun had decided to show itself so we grabbed the chance to get some pics!
Enjoy!
Thanks for reading!
