Hardest Vehicle you ever detailed?

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piaaump

New member
I ask this question as I have just had the experience of doing the hardest vehicle I have ever done.....

My daughter has come home from the Army while my SIL is deployed overseas and brought home my 15 month old grandson and her 3 dogs.....all trucked from Ft Leonard Wood Mo, to Western Pa in her 2006 Nissan Pathfinder......

Gratefully she keeps her vehicle semi-clean, but the baby, 3 dogs, and a dirt road left it in dire need of a complete detail........

Up until now, I had thought my old Ford Expedition (for total size) or my sons Jeep Cherokee (for odd body shape and trim) as the most diffcult to detail...

This vehicle was a bear.......odd body angles, lots of trim, recesses where dirt can hide........height and bulk, differing floor levels..........I spent a good 8 hour day and im expecting another couple of days to get it right......

I wish I had taken pictures but I was already mid-job when I thought of it....so this is the question, what is the most difficult vehicle you ever had to detail?.......and why ......
 
piaaump said:
I ask this question as I have just had the experience of doing the hardest vehicle I have ever done.....

My daughter has come home from the Army while my SIL is deployed overseas and brought home my 15 month old grandson and her 3 dogs.....all trucked from Ft Leonard Wood Mo, to Western Pa in her 2006 Nissan Pathfinder......

Gratefully she keeps her vehicle semi-clean, but the baby, 3 dogs, and a dirt road left it in dire need of a complete detail........

Up until now, I had thought my old Ford Expedition (for total size) or my sons Jeep Cherokee (for odd body shape and trim) as the most diffcult to detail...

This vehicle was a bear.......odd body angles, lots of trim, recesses where dirt can hide........height and bulk, differing floor levels..........I spent a good 8 hour day and im expecting another couple of days to get it right......

I wish I had taken pictures but I was already mid-job when I thought of it....so this is the question, what is the most difficult vehicle you ever had to detail?.......and why ......
Click to expand...


Several for many different reasons....

In terms of "will this ever end"... A new black 458 Italia Ferrari. The owner called me and said it had too much orange peel. 60 hours of wet sanding on a $300,000 dollar car later....

In terms of "don't screw up"... the only surviving original paint 427 Cobra in the world. A burned edge would have resulted in over SIX FIGURES in devaluation. This is the only car to ever win 100 percent at the Shelby nationals

In terms of "why aren't these minor scratches coming out" the carbon fiber blue Bugatti Veryon Super Sport. The paint was SOOOO hard that even removing minor marks was difficult.

In terms of "can you make a car more difficult to polish" was an original paint Lamborghini Miura. Lots of lacquer check, weird angles, and general head scratching.
 
An older Lincoln Town Car. It was the first car I did. A polish, seal, and interior. The swirls in the paint would not budge. It was my second time using a polisher though. The interior was super clean and the engine bay was actually more clean than my cars.

Won't ever forget working on it though.
 
This one.


Original Henry Ford steel, not a reproduction car. Because it was original 1932 steel, the panels didn't line up that great and a lot of edges needed to be taped off for protection. There were some odd curves, corners, and a flimsy hood that was difficult to polish. There were some repainted areas that reacted differently requiring several different combos to correct. The hood just has a flimsy piano hinge and louvers on the sides so trying to hold it steady and use pressure took a helper to hold it securely. I had to be a contortionist to reach some areas.

Not a lot of paint to work on, but man was it a work out.

Randy
 
The hardest car I work on was in 1985 and it was the Batmobile that a dealer had in a show room. What a pain it was.... :wall
 
SL65 black eddition was the hardest one I ever mess with. Nothing would come out of this car it took like 20 pass's a section with a rotary wool pad and 3m perfect it compound to even put a dent in the swirls. Then polishing the buffer trash out was a whole nother animal by far the longest time I've ever spent on just paint correction. Litterally 100+ hours and when it was done there was still a few places that I just couldnt get right.... I don't know why it was such a pain I've done a few other ones since then and not nearly as bad. I remember staring at the hood under under halogens after multiple pass's in a 2x2 spot for like 30 minutes thinking if I stare long enough maybe the scratches will go away :wall
 
my wife's jet black bimmer. have polished to perfection, or so i thought. only to do the lsp and the scratches return. so easy to scratch that without protection the paint will mar with a dry finger. frustrating indeed
 
Most frustrating: My father's 1999 Navigator. Even with a rotary, that truck was a pill to buff.
Worst ever: A customer's Cadillac that had so much junk in it that it reminded you of an episode of "Hoarders".
 
The biggest pain was an 60 ton Krupp crane. I think it took 2 of us 4 hrs just to wash it.
I did a 2008 Traiverse not to long ago that was all scratched up. Paint was really hard. Way hard. About 7 hrs just compounding it.
 
'52 Ferrari 212 Drogo in piss poor shape. Owner wanted it improved as much as possible, but the paint was cracking and pulling up all over the vehicle. ALL of the trim, vents, and bumpers were removed (the nuts and bolts were original, shaped by hand, not fun; I was paranoid I was going to strip them out). The paint was super hard and a real pain to work on. M105/PFW/rotary took three or four applications to make a dent in some of the deeper scratches. As usual, reassembly was much more pain staking than disassembly, just the two fender vents took me about an hour and a half to get secured. Awkward positions made it only *just* possibly for my clumsy hands to get in there.

Its not something I don't look forward to doing again, but I have a better idea of what I'd be getting into!
 
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