Could I have done better? Advice needed!!

[Brazo]

Hi guys I did a detail on the weekend after a guy had taken a cold claybar to his car with insufficient lube and well produced the lovely effect below!

Quite severe marring/holograms and swirls, that showed up in the shade!!!



I did improve it massivly but very fine swirls till resulted which for the life of me I couldn't remove. My question is what could I have tried? I don't think it was micromarring as stepping down didn't remove them.



Process: I used a rotary @1000-1500rpm, cyclo and a pc (all speeds) and an assortment of polishes, mainly the whole ssr line. I used mainly foam polishing pads but did use a foam cutting pad at one point - no differenceI started soft worked up and down again but just could not shift the swirls. The car is a renault clio, I have a lot of experience with these clios and have had no trouble perfecting them in the past. Generally the paint is medium softness (clearcoated). I used the same process that I recently used on an audi with A1 results but it just wouldn't work. The guy was very pleased but I wasn't satisified!



Here is the after pic, you will notice the light grouping isn't as tight as it could be with some fine swirls.

Many thanks in advance

 

[hood rich]

i have spent hours beating myself up over a job i'm not satisfied with... the fluorescent lights can really work against you sometimes.... every time i wasn't 100% satisfied with the job, i'd pull it outside and the car would look like a million bucks. i definitely see a huge improvement, pictures are hard to judge your work by though. i think it looks really good, but can't give you my final opinion unless i saw the car in person.





here's how i normally do cars that have light scratches or swirls and have dark paint:

-using my dewalt rotary buffer i'd use a wool finish pad to cut with... it's not the wool polishing pad... it's the one in between the polish pad and cut pad... not extremely agressive but usually can do the job no problem. i do not like using foam pads to cut with, they just don't do the job right.



-next i'd switch to my porter cable 7424 and would use the green foam polishing pad made for german paints. i like to use menzerna's final polish II with the green foam pad... you will be very happy on darker paints.



-after the polish i like to look it over and make sure i didn't miss anything then wax with menzerna's FMJ.





that's kind of a quick overview of the process i like to do... but you can get the general idea. i have been very happy with the menzerna product line and the green foam pads... every vehicle i do ends up looking better than new when i'm done. it works for me.... there might be another method that works better for you.

 

[Brazo]

Thanks Rich



Your process though is similer to what I have used previously to go from



this

to this

this

to this

and this

to this

So it can be done I just struggled with this car



Any other thoughts people?



TIA!

 

[DrSauekraut]

Hmmm . . . not what I’d expect to see after so many various attempts. Is it possible that maybe you were having a bad day?

 

[Tasty]

Yeah, that's quite an assortment of gear and product to go through and not be happy. Weird.