WX51 TXR
New member
A long road trip south of the border to Newcastle for this one, and a stay overnight, as my usual long distance cruising speed has had to be almost halved since I was pulled last month doing over a ton. I was contacted by the owner about a month ago, and the pics he e-mailed through were scary! A very bad case of the swirls, on a limited edition 350Z GT4 with full bodykit. I had estimated that this one would take me 8-10 hours, and in the end it took 11 hours, due to a heavy rain shower late in the day.
When I arrived at 8am the sun was beaming down, and the first thing I noticed were the swirls - not good on a car that draws a lot of attention. I didn’t need the halogens to tell me how bad this one was going to be, but I figured the paint would be soft – this turned out to be correct, but what I didn’t plan on was extremely thin paint. Put simply, if I hadn’t of had my paint thickness gauge with me, I would have done one of two things to this car. Either I wouldn’t have corrected half the defects (by going at it too gently), or I would have removed too much clear (by treating all panels the same). I have seen a few arrogant remarks posted on forums recently concerning the need for paint gauges – in my opinion they are an essential tool, even for PC only users like me. Hopefully the rest of this thread will show you why…
Here’s how the car looked when I arrived…
Looks great, but in the sun the problems soon become visible…
And more unpleasant up close…
The owner had very kindly washed the car the night before and garaged it overnight, so a full wash was not required – I simply quick detailed the whole car with JEFFS Werkstatt Quick Wash and a couple of plush towels. Then I set to work claying with Meguiars Detailing Clay – this only took 30 minutes, as the car was very clean – only the doors shows signs of significant contamination, on most other panels the clay came up clean. I then masked off all the trims, and set to work on the roof, which looked like this…
Lots of brush marks, swirls and even the odd rotary trail. I took paint readings with my PosiTest DFT over the whole panel, and found an alarming average thickness of ~80 microns, with some areas only reading 70 microns. I started out with Blackfire SRC Finishing Polish using a LK green finishing pad. I made a light initial attempt (1st pass at speed 1 to spread, then multiple passes at speed 4 until ready to buff) and observed little improvement, and no significant amount of paint removal (precision of paint gauge is +/- 2 microns). I then repeated, this time using more pressure and speed. Once again, no big signs of improvement, and no significant paint loss, so I switched to a LK orange light cut pad and did the same again. This time, I saw a noticeable improvement in the defects, at the expense of 4 microns across the panel. However, with the defects persisting and the paint thickness down to ~65 microns in places, I decided that would do. The results were satisfactory…
When I arrived at 8am the sun was beaming down, and the first thing I noticed were the swirls - not good on a car that draws a lot of attention. I didn’t need the halogens to tell me how bad this one was going to be, but I figured the paint would be soft – this turned out to be correct, but what I didn’t plan on was extremely thin paint. Put simply, if I hadn’t of had my paint thickness gauge with me, I would have done one of two things to this car. Either I wouldn’t have corrected half the defects (by going at it too gently), or I would have removed too much clear (by treating all panels the same). I have seen a few arrogant remarks posted on forums recently concerning the need for paint gauges – in my opinion they are an essential tool, even for PC only users like me. Hopefully the rest of this thread will show you why…
Here’s how the car looked when I arrived…
Looks great, but in the sun the problems soon become visible…
And more unpleasant up close…
The owner had very kindly washed the car the night before and garaged it overnight, so a full wash was not required – I simply quick detailed the whole car with JEFFS Werkstatt Quick Wash and a couple of plush towels. Then I set to work claying with Meguiars Detailing Clay – this only took 30 minutes, as the car was very clean – only the doors shows signs of significant contamination, on most other panels the clay came up clean. I then masked off all the trims, and set to work on the roof, which looked like this…
Lots of brush marks, swirls and even the odd rotary trail. I took paint readings with my PosiTest DFT over the whole panel, and found an alarming average thickness of ~80 microns, with some areas only reading 70 microns. I started out with Blackfire SRC Finishing Polish using a LK green finishing pad. I made a light initial attempt (1st pass at speed 1 to spread, then multiple passes at speed 4 until ready to buff) and observed little improvement, and no significant amount of paint removal (precision of paint gauge is +/- 2 microns). I then repeated, this time using more pressure and speed. Once again, no big signs of improvement, and no significant paint loss, so I switched to a LK orange light cut pad and did the same again. This time, I saw a noticeable improvement in the defects, at the expense of 4 microns across the panel. However, with the defects persisting and the paint thickness down to ~65 microns in places, I decided that would do. The results were satisfactory…
