Car is staying. So is the air. And so are the wheels. I had that "click" when cleaning the wheels funnily enough and now I love it.
Following the purchase of a DAS6 PRO I've been able to get back into the detailing side of things again. I just do friends and familys cars but expanding out to forum members etc.
Recently I completed 2 stage machine polish and headlight restoration on my friends Audi S3 as a thankyou for polishing my lips when I first put the wheels together. Over 20 hours of work and really pleased how it came out.
Before
After
Roof 50/50
I decided to actually get on with mine instead of doing everyone elses!!
As the weather was on-off decent this afternoon and tomorrow will be good I thought I'd use these two days to get started. If I got the car to a point where I could just wipe away the surface dust in the morning and start maching that would be best so that's what I did.
The car is always kept clean so no need for a heavy decon wash. Broke out my favorite shampoo Ammo NYC Foam which I had imported from the USA (as you cannot buy it in the UK currently). It's so slip-slidey and bubbly as well (bubbles don't always mean good lubricity) and smells like bubblegum mixed with fairly liquid.
It's a very gentle wax safe shampoo [y]
After rinsing the car down I got cracking with the wash!
Depending on the soiling of the car I use a 2BM but most times I can get away with the one bucket. Using a 2BM on a relatively clean car is just a waste of time despite what some others may say. They absolutely have their place but here it wasn't necessary
After washing it was rinsed down again and the windows were dried at this point.
Got cracking with the claying
As this clay requires only water to be used I left the paint wet, got my double action trigger sprayer, added water and a drop of fairy liquid and got claying.
While I did clay it when I first got it, it was a bit of a rush job. Also having the car go through the bodyshop some overspray was present especially on the freshly painted panels. As the paints used are waterbased there was no need to worry about damaging the fresh paint anyway but I was extra gentle on these panels out of caution.
You can see some tar contamination here. On my drive to work (and subsequently home and to get lunch...) they had been doing road works which I can only imagine caused it.
It then started to rain so I rinsed the car off and left it. No point drying it if it's just going to get wet again. I went to make a Bacon Sandwich and Ben and his missus popped over and we went to play with his RC car! Many rolling overs and doughnuts later
we went home and I got back on with the car.
Gave it another rinse down and then to help remove the clay residue I went around the car firing the hose into the face of the mitt and going across the paintwork. Basically wherever the mitt goes there is constant flow of water so plenty of lubrication.
following this I dried the car with a microfibre towel as usual. normally (and perfectly natural to) you miss a bit so when you dry it you end up with dirty patches but I think for the first time ever it's pretty spotless!
You can see it's starting to get dark, it's around 7pm and I'm still in summer mode so think there's plenty of light left..
After drying we are left with the car as is.. still comes up nicely to be fair.
So I buzz out my scene tape (regular low-tack masking tape works just as well it's just not blue) and get cracking.
If you don't do this sort of thing you don't realise how truly time consuming it is taping up a car. I'm going to do the paint first and then the rear taillights so I'll have to re-tape those after the paint is sorted. Took me probably an hour and a half to tape it all up, but then I wasn't really rushing.
Ran out of light so had to do things by feel LOL
Still got the rear bumper and skirts to tape off but I really couldn't be arsed to do anymore tonight.
Just looking forward to tomorrow really early start, Bacon for brekkie and then a quick wipe down and then get set up to get the swirls out.
As it's hard enough to get photos of swirls on silver I did what I could.
The door trim cover thing.
Marks on the roof, passenger side
And another of the roof further back
So much for a weekend of relaxing!!!
