Part I:
Somebody here asked if it was worth it to spend the time needed to bring up a high gloss shine on a white car, what with white not being able to show the depth of color you get from black, red and other dark colors.
Well, Justin (AKA Z28toXFire) has an Alabaster Crossfire Limited Coupe that was a, well, swirled mess. Forgive me buddy, but it was, plain and simple.
So I offered to have him bring the car by Meguiar's Garage and I'd see what I could do. I know when I picked up my own car in July '07 it had only 32 miles on it but had sat around dealer lots for a couple of years, and the paint was a mess. I quickly learned how hard the paint is on these cars, and when in a horrible state they need a pretty aggressive approach to correct the problem. That held true with Justin's car as well.
Here's the car when it rolled up to Meguiar's Garage around 9:45AM yesterday morning:
Now that doesn't look too bad at first glance, does it? But out in the sun it looked like this:
But that picture, of a rear quarter panel, doesn't tell the full tale. The hood was a disaster:
It not only looked bad, it felt fairly awful as well, so our first step was to quickly clay the car. This came off half the roof, which is a pretty small panel on a two seater!
Since past experience indicated this was most likely going to be a rotary job, and since we had very limited time to work on this car, we started taping off in anticipation of a full rotary process - the fender strakes and other areas were subsequently taped off before proceeding.
M105 was definitely going to be called to duty, but a decision still needed to made regarding pad choice. We started with the WWHC7 Wool Heavy Cutting Pad from the So1o line...
A half and half comparison showed this wasn't quite going to do it....
.... so out came the W5000 Double Sided Wool Pad.....
.... and that was much more like it. So that was our plan, with Justin following behind with a G110, M205 Ultra Finishing Polish and W9207 Soft Buff 2.0 Finishing Pad. He worked that combination slowly for a fairly long period of time to reveal a high clarity, high gloss finish.
Part II below: