FCD never turn a car away but we will be honest, we do lose jobs and it is normally due to cost. People often ask us how much it would cost to bring up their cars paint to a polished bliss to only feel a bit shocked when we mention the price. Just because we work on some of the most amazing cars in the world, does not mean our prices are overpriced!
To remove years of damage can take some time as the correct methods need to be used in such a way not to cause more damage!
Take for example this S reg Jaguar XJR V8. The owner of this car loves it for its sentimental value and decided to treat it to our enhancement detail. After 22 years of car washes it was certainly safe to say this paint was tired! How much work is required to bring this paint back up?
Well the paint doesn't look too bad, right? Can't take that long surely?
How about under light...
As you can see these are some very deep swirls, scratches and chemical stains. This has been caused by poor washing techniques.
To bring up this paint we will need a 3 stage method.
We will require a heavy cut polish with a wool pad and medium yellow foam pad
To refine this marks left in this process we will use a soft white pad and ultra fine polish
The machines we will be using are a rotary and a dual action. The rotary will cut back and dual action will remove the marks left by the wool pad.
Using a wool pad, rotary and heavy cut we passed over the pain a total of 3 times to "cut back" enough of the dead paint.
Wool pads leave marring and small swirls and require a second stage to remove the marks they generate. This is done with a yellow medium pad, heavy cut polish and a dual action polisher. This took 2 passes.
To remove marring and bring the shine, the soft white polishing pad, ultra fine polish and dual action were passed over the paint once.
To bring the bonnet up to around 80% corrected it took a total of 2 hours and total of 36 individual passes. A pass consist of a 3 by 3 grid movement. This means the polisher passed over the bonnet a total of 324 times to produce this finish...
The little white dots are paint defects and not something which can be removed. Only under intense light do you really notice them.
To provide you with a better example this is the boot lid.
After the wool pad stage was carried out we can instantly see a difference.
Here you can see the marring left by the wool pad.
In the sun this would appear to be a wavy pattern. Buffer trails as they are some times known are hard to get rid. If you do not have the correct polishes, pads or technique you can end up putting more in rather than taking away!
30 minutes later we were able to refine the boot lid. You will still see some visible lines. To remove these would require another hour of polishing per panel to remove these much deeper marks.
In total it has taken just under a week and around 20 hours of polishing alone to enhance the paint.