Need Opinions - Black Honda Accord

C

CatVert68

New member
This afternoon we picked up my wife's Honda Accord from the detailers. We paid $450 for a touch-up, detail, and wax. The "before" is a black car with heavy scratching from car washes, kids, and just 6 years of road use in New England while getting casual to neglectful care.



I had started to do the detailing myself and realized that I didn't have the right combination of products, pads, etc to get the car right. Since this detail is an IOU from her birthday in September, we decided to send it out.



Upon getting the car home and in the garage under bright halogen lights, there still appears to be some hazing in the paint and some remaining scattered scratches. I'm trying to decide if this is just a function of the age of the paint or if there is more aggressive detailing that could make the car look even better.



BTW, my wife loves the way it looks. She's thoroughly satisfied and happy, so the main objective is met. For my learning, though, I'd like to get a sense of how picky I can or should be, especially when I start doing this for myself and trying to achieve "perfection".
 
For $450 what did the detailer say he would do??



I would think there shouldn't be any significant hazing. Maybe a few scattered thinned out scratchs that are too deep to buff out.



Do you have any pics??
 
JoshVette said:
For $450 what did the detailer say he would do??



I would think there shouldn't be any significant hazing. Maybe a few scattered thinned out scratchs that are too deep to buff out.



Do you have any pics??
Click to expand...



Actually, he said he'd make the car look like it just came from the showroom but I'm enough of a realist to not hold him to that on a 6-yr-old car.



The following pictures were taken under flourescent ceiling lights, halogen lights, and with a flash. I couldn't get decent shots without the flash.



Before initial wash:

DSCN0576.jpg




The white specks around the grille openings are chips that needed touch-up. There is one chip that didn't get completely filled and still shows as a white speck, but everything else got filled in OK.



Here are the after shots:



DSCN0579.jpg




DSCN0582.jpg




I did notice that the wheel wells didn't get cleaned and blacked. I would have expected that for the kind of money we spent, but that's a different issue.
 
CatVert68 said:
DSCN0579.jpg
Click to expand...



Take it back and complain...point out your windshield wiper cowls, and it looks like from the corner of the flash it looks like heavy hazing or holograms from the rotary. It doesnt even look like they cleaned the wheel wells, much less dressed them. For $450 that thing should be looking perfect.
 
definitely agree with josh, from the flash in the corner of that pic there appears to be marring of some sort, i know the wifes happy but that does not justify 450 dollars, most pros on here would charge around 250 for a pretty thourough detail on that car. that is unacceptable. they wheel wells look untouched, the tip of the bonnet doesnt look polished either. for 450 dollars i wouldve kept it and worked on it for two or three days, added multiple layers of a sg and topped it a few times with a nuba. completely detailed the engine, undercoat the whell wells. hell if im keeping a car for a few days i will remove the wheels and polish in inners as well. COMPLAIN COMPLAIN COMPLAIN, the sqweaky (sp) (dirty wheel well) gets the grease. you should expect much more than that for your money imo.
 
:eek: That doesn't look so great! I guess your wife just liked the jesture of you have ing the car detailed.
 
Are those pics right after he did it? or has it been drivin a few days aready?? hard to tell, but it shouldn't be hard to tell after a thorough detailing.



That kind of hazing is not excusable, I would call or take it back and have them right their wrong.



Also get a good description this time of exactly what will be cleaned and such.....but I guess if he said "showroom floor" then that's definately not it, unless he was only describing the condition of how the paint will look afterwards......even that's not show room condition.



Sorry to hear about the whole situation.
 
sneek said:
:eek: That doesn't look so great! I guess your wife just liked the jesture of you have ing the car detailed.
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All my wife has seen is how it looks in natural light, which is very glossy and far, far better than it's looked in a long time. I haven't let her know my opinion on the matter because I don't want to diminish her satisfaction.



The detailer kept it for two days, saying that the paint touch-up needed to be done the first day, then the finish detailing the second. That sounded reasonable to me. I absolutely expected the normal detailing areas to be done, such as the wheel wells.



When we arrived to pick up the car, we did note that the lowest area of the bumper cover from each rear wheel to the curve at the rear looked like it hadn't been cleaned. We had them clean and wax those sections before we left.



Beyond that, I doubt there's much we can do. The quote was originally given to my wife on the back of a business card, so I don't know exactly what was promised. The quote about looking showroom new is what she told me the detailer promised. In her eyes, that's what they delivered, but she doesn't look at the car quite the same way I do.



So I'll take it as a lesson learned and put the time into learning to do this at the level of quality I want. We have another Honda that we bought used for my daughter to drive starting next year, so I can muck with that one and not worry about what I do to it during the learning curve. It's also gold rather than black, which will let me work my way up before I either tackle this Honda again or my black F-150 (which really needs to be done this coming summer).
 
JoshVette said:
Are those pics right after he did it? or has it been drivin a few days aready?? hard to tell, but it shouldn't be hard to tell after a thorough detailing.



That kind of hazing is not excusable, I would call or take it back and have them right their wrong.



Also get a good description this time of exactly what will be cleaned and such.....but I guess if he said "showroom floor" then that's definately not it, unless he was only describing the condition of how the paint will look afterwards......even that's not show room condition.



Sorry to hear about the whole situation.
Click to expand...



The car was driven straight home (about 5 miles) and put into the garage so I can detail the interior tomorrow. So those pics are fresh from the detailers.
 
I think I'd be sick spending $450 for just an exterior, and have it still not look that great--and with lots of missed stuff.



When I do it on the side, I charge 1/4 of that, and that's everything--and don't leave much untouched. As was said, pro's on here that do a supreme job still only charge about half of what you paid.



Call it a BIG-BIG lesson learned, and one you should never ever do again.
 
450 and you have to do the inside yourself??



Bottom line is, detailing can only do so much. You can polish, buff, and wax until you're blue in the face but you can't make the car new again. You said yourself that you've somewhat neglected it through 6 new england winters so you shouldn't expect perfection.



This forum sort of tricks you into thinking that a car can be made and kept perfect under any circumstances. It's just not true. Also, there is such a thing as over-polishing. At some point you have to ask yourself if buffing out more scratches is worth amount of clear coat you have to sacrifice. Maybe these guys thought that they couldn't go any further.



I'm just playing devils advocate here. I'd be pissed too. The wheel wells, and the wiper cowls are horrendous. The fact that you have to do the interior yourself is total bull crap. Did they do the door jambs? Vacuum the trunk? Did they dress the exterior trim? What about the headlights? This whole thing reeks.



Unfortunately there isn't much you can do. The worst thing you can do is go back there and make a big fuss. I would talk to the manager and gently explain your dissatisfaction. If he's any kind of businessman he will gladly take the car back and fix anything you're dissatisfied with. If he doesn't then I would post his name and the pictures of his shoddy work all over this board. Then I would call the better business bureau and the local chamber of commerce and report this guy.
 
Less said:
450 and you have to do the inside yourself??



Bottom line is, detailing can only do so much. You can polish, buff, and wax until you're blue in the face but you can't make the car new again. You said yourself that you've somewhat neglected it through 6 new england winters so you shouldn't expect perfection.
Click to expand...



If you look at my original post, you'll note that I took the claim of showroom quality with a dose of salt. However, he did quote a price that specifically did not include the interior and I expected a great result for that price. In fact, he did get a lot of the light scratches out, by far the majority of them.



All but one of the rock chips were touched up successfully and a white scuff mark on the rear bumper was also touched up successfully. In the daylight, the car gleams unless you know how to look at it to see under the surface shine. I know how to do that; my wife doesn't. So she's very happy. Had he gotten the results he did without the underlying haze, even I would have been satisfied.



My wife is one of those people who views a car as a basic tool and it shows. However, I've been showing her over time the difference between cars that are well-kept and those that are not and she is gradually coming around. I think the other Honda we bought, which is a year older than hers, but looks light-years better even with 60K more miles on the clock, helped serve as a wake-up call.



I also use the cost of something like this to appeal to her miserly instincts and note that better care all the time would have made this expensive visit unnecessary because I could have handled normal wear. I just didn't have the right components on hand to deal with scratches made by my two teens putting their backpacks on the trunk, for example, and then sliding them off. :wall



The interior looks like a dust bowl. It hasn't been wiped down in ages. I only got her to clean out the "landfill" by pointing out that I've scheduled the car for a satellite radio installation on Wednesday and we owe to the installers to give them a reasonably clean place to work. :D



Oh well, I'll get it all sorted out and then keep the car up. She wants her next car to be a Jaguar X-Type. I'll just tell her that isn't going to happen until I see this one being treated like it still has some value. :waxing:
 
i am all for guys that know what theyre doing charging in the 300's for honda sedans, once i see some people doing so, i will definitely follow suit, that is just clearly not the case in this circumstance. if they were genuinely concerned about how much clear they are removing why did they even use a rotary? why did they leave rotary trails? devils advocate does not work here at all. the person that cahrged you 450 dollars is the devil lmao. take it back and tell him you want your wells done, the lsp removed with 50/50 ipa wipedown, and use a final polish over the thing again then reapply an lsp. that's all i can tell ya. once again im all for these seasoned veterans on this site making that kind of money, but the guy that did this doesnt deserve 100 dollars for that job.
 
GregCavi said:
That pretty much sums it up for me.



Greg
Click to expand...



Thanks to everyone for the advice on this issue. You're all right that I should take it back, but I've decided to let it go, for a couple of reasons.



The first, and most important, reason is that I wasn't the one who got the estimate from the detailer. My wife did and she confirmed that he quoted the price as being limited to just working on the body panels. So he'll argue that wheel wells, etc. were never part of the deal and he'll be correct.



The second reason is that I own a piece of this. The price sounded high to me and I didn't follow through with the due diligence until after the fact. My bad. I should have talked to them more when we dropped the car off to make sure I knew exactly what to expect from them.



BTW, after looking closely at the car under the halogen lights, I finally figured out something that was bugging me. The hood and the fender are not the same color. It's not a shade difference; they're actually different colors. The original color on the car is Nighthawk Black Pearl, which has the blue pigment in it that you can see in the pics above. The hood, which is a replacement that was painted by a friend of mine after my wife rear-ended a trailer hitch-equipped pickup several years ago, is pure black. There's no blue at all.



We never noticed the difference until I had the car under the halogen lights and, even then, it wasn't immediately obvious until I got the additional effect of sunlight slanting through the garage window at the right angle. Outdoors, you'd never see the difference and no one ever has.



Anyway, thanks to all who responded. I'm going to figure out how to do this work myself. In the end, that will save us far more than the money we paid out this time and I won't have to argue with the detailer about who said what or whether he has the appropriate skills for the line of work he's chosen. I much prefer the holidays at home to being behind bars. :laugh:
 
I think its great that you will be fixing the errors yourself! Make sure to take plenty of before pics under the halo's, and when your done, stop by the "detailers" to show him how real work is done. :)



Greg
 
my advice is pretty simple, get your hands on a good da(pc) menzernas fp2 and a white polishing pad.



prerinse with 50-50 white vinegar water

wash with dawn

wipe down with 50-50 ipa water

fp2 is a great place to start polishing. you dont have to have such slow movement to avoid inducing more damage. you will be able to clear up much of what was left behind.

top it with an lsp of your choice.



you will get great results with this process and you don't really have to know what youre doing.after you do it, you can take it to the guy and explain to him that this is what you expected and that you couldve just done it yourself if you had known he was a ripoff. I'm glad i live in the middle of nowhere when it comes to threads like this, becuase if you were within driving distance i'd just tell you to bring it to me to get it right. im a bleeding heart i assume. i dont like getting ripped off and i dont like it when someone tells me i have been. you are the victim in this case though sad to say.
 
Brian, I appreciate the advice. I was actually going to ask at some point. The process you've outlined looks pretty straightforward. All I need to buy is the fp2 and the white pad.



I already have a PC 7424 and took advantage of the Lowes deal today by picking up a 7336 to have on hand as well.



If I add a blue finishing pad and some Natty's, does that make sense as an lsp choice?
 
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