Today I did some detailing...

To be honest, I know my brother will appreciate it. He'll love having it cleaned up and looking good, but i also know that it'll be let slip straight back into it's current state and anything I do won't be maintained. In a month's time you'd never have know I was anywhere near it.

But, as Curran says above, it is a practice car. It's to let me try out some stuff without having to do it on my own pride and joy.

If I accidentally tear lumps off the Rav4 using the DAS6, I'll break down in tears and cry for weeks on end. If I end up doing damage to the Megane, I'll shrug it off and go again to try and figure out where I'm going wrong.

My brother doesn't care if I do a bit of damage to it in the process as he knows himself it's not in great nick. In saying that, he does have two kids and a full time job, etc. - If he had the time he'd probably be the same as me. When he first got the car he spent a few quid getting the wheels for it and such, so he does like his car to look presentable and such (although personally, I'm not mad about anything over 5 spoke on alloys) but he just doesnt have the time and has to treat it as a practical object (get from A-B).



Speaking of which:

Today I did a bit of running around as the rain was too heavy to bother starting on the car when I woke up (got up at 9am to get cracking). Used it to my advantage though and popped over to Homebase. The finest sand paper they had that I could find was something like 320 or something. It was far too coarse, so I popped into halfords and they had 1500 and 2000 grit available. I opted for the 1500 as they both felt fairly similar and it was half the price for the same size sheets.

I also picked up a cheap ass 'alloy wheel brush' and an equally cheap 'upholstery brush' while I was in there. They're doing some promotions at the moment in the shop (a "3 products for €12" promo is advertised. Although I'm not the silliest person in the world - the promo looks like it includes everything in the car cleaning section, as they have it horribly labelled. I expect lots of headaches for checkout staff and customers in there unless they sort it).

Oh, here's my 'STAR BUY' recommendation - Homebase have a paid of Gardening Gloves for €7.50. I was wearing them today with a pair of those cheapo disposable 'surgical' gloves underneath. The surgical gloves on their own aren't much cop as the finger tips end up tearing off and such, but with both them and the gardening gloves, my hands were grand and warm, and bone dry. Thoroughly recommend them. I remember cleaning the Rav the first time with no gloves at all and my fingers were literally numb. My skin was nearly peeling. Highly recommend good gloves.


I also went to Motor Factors and picked up a tub o' paint for €12 (and a tiny, useless looking brush, for €1. Looks like it'll go bald as soon as I dip it into the tub of paint). So I'll do some paint touching up after I clay.

I snow foamed today. I didn't get 'shaving foam' thick, but I did get 'sit on the car and dwell' thick. Well.. I would have if it wasn't drizzling and the car wasn't already soaking. A lovely, lovely change from the watery milk. I 2BM'ed the car, Iron cleansed the wheels (and wheel cleansed them, and went at the tyres with a brush) and then dried it off to bring it inside.




I let the Iron sit for about 10 minutes:






Although I stuck with my Glossworkz shampoo (instead of Mr Pink), I did get to use the microfibre madness mitt and the Dry me Crazy towel.

My quick thoughts: The Mitt is worlds away from the stuff I've been using up to this point. It's sheer size and foam lining (that seems to soak up loads of water) make it a joy to use. However, it does shed its hair if you go over anything awkward (the "MEGANE" writing on the back of the car took a few hairs of the mitt, for example). But it was quite good and because it holds so much water, it was great for doing a good bit at a time. Especially the windscreen.

The Dry Me Crazy towel is miles ahead of the Meguiars water magnet. It's a thick, 2-ply design and it will soak up a lot. However, my common sense was obviously all used up, but make sure you wash it before you use it. Like any towel, on first application, it will shed itself all over you (sounds sexual). I had to use the water magnet towel today to clean up after the dry me crazy. It wasn't terribly bad, but enough to be annoying (and warrant an extra going over with a different towel).

These products are both quality though and I highly advise anyone that hasn't already gotten them to bite the bullet. For the money (€40 i think it was) you're getting loads. The level of quality of the two products alone surpasses all other products in the same price range in Halfords or such, and then when you throw in the Mr Pink into the mix, too, it's a genuine bargain.



I also made my first attempt at cleaning the fabric interior today (as the rain was starting to come again after I dried the car, I moved it indoors and opted to work on the interior).

Equipped with both CG's Fabric Clean and Tesco Foam Upholstery cleaner, I decided to use Tesco's stuff initially (as it had previously did a great job of removing an annoying stain on the ceiling of my Rav4).

I sprayed some on to the back left seat (decided to start with the rear seats incase I fecked up along the way, as they aren't really used) and I laced into it with the rough upholstery brush. I soon began to realise the errors of my ways when the seat's fabric was getting so 'hairy' (from the fibres being pulled up by the brush) that the pattern of small circles that are on the seats was completely hidden.

I decided to try the seat beside it using CG's Fabric Clean and a microfibre cloth. With this combo, i still used the brush, but only to aggravate the parts of the fabric that were actually stained or such. I got much better results doing this. However.. the seats were still not great when I left the car for the day.

The drivers seat has relatively bad staining, so i went over it twice and used lots of CGs fabric clean (suggested dilution is 20:1, i was using it around 10:1, maybe even 7 or 8:1). I was using the brush and such, too, but I don't feel overly happy with my progress on the seats.

Hopefully it was just dampness making them look a bit patchy and they'll be okay tomorrow, but at the time i felt like i was putting a lot of work in and not getting much back in terms of results. as I say, could just be dampness not making them look too great.

I also used Meguiar's Quik interior detailer to do the dash and related areas. This is a very decent spray. Better than i thought, but still lacking something. I'd hate an overly glossy dashboard (a fella i know that drives a van, had it valeted before, and they used something on the dash and console,etc. that made it really shiny. It looked crap. Real Fisher Price look to it).

So I'm not sure where I stand on that, now. Unless I slap some Autoglym 'trim gel' onto it to try and make it look a bit richer?

Oh, a (nother) question: I can get paint for the car easily enough. It's got a paint code.

But can I get a trim paint at all? The trim on the car looks like it could do with some touching up, aswell as the car itself.

And if I can; Can I polish the trim in the same way I can polish the bodywork of the car itself? Or will the plastic trim just scratch under the DAS and tear the paint off it? (should i avoid machining trim altogether?)

Ah, really? That's a pity.


Might consider picking up a grey/silver aerosol and re-spraying them whole, then... just for the experience of trying it out. Would require a lot of taping up though, I presume.

Would need to sand down the door edge, that's damaged, too.

Hmm... decisions, decisions.

That's true, too.

Ah feck it, I won't bother my ass touching them then (except a light sanding of the part on the door edge that's shredded to bits).

MetzgerMeister wrote: »

KKV, I'm still perplexed at how little reaction the iron cleanse is getting. Are you applying it to the wheel when it's wet??

That time the wheel was wet, yeah. My apologies, I thought I had said that in the post (I didn't).

It was just after getting foamed and rinsed when I ironed it.

I plan to go for round 2 tomorrow as the car will be dry when I start off. I just need to hope for an hour with no rain so I can iron cleanse the car and rinse it, and then de tar it and rinse it (then i can dry it and bring it back in for claying).

Although at the moment I still don't know if I need to re-do the interior just yet. Will have to see how that has turned out.

Today I did day two of the Megane. Got the car Iron cleansed, de-tarred, clayed and I machine polished the front end (so I still have the doors and rear to do. The roof is mostly glass on that car, so that won't take too long).


So I machined the bonnet. I was afraid of the DAS being very strong and me accidentally 'etching' the paint or such.

I use this CG's hex-logic guide for reference (I have every pad except the blue one).

http://www.detailingworld.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=284956


So I found a small scratch on the bonnet and focused on it. I started with the green pad, as it's the least aggressive as far as I can see. It didn't do much. So I then moved up to the Orange pad. No real difference.

So I warily took out the yellow pad.

Reading the description, I began to feel a little worried...

This pad itself is capable of leaving its own foot print behind. Due to the nature of its cut and as before should only be used under extreme circumstances. Providing your paint levels are capable of handing this level of cut.

So either I'm doing it wrong, or that's sensationalist bollocks.

I sat on the scratch and put no pressure on it, i put lots of pressure on it, I went over it back and forth, i used a circular motion, and it's still there! Now, admittedly, it's not as obvious as it was, and it has been 'covered up' a bit, but it's still there. I was under the impression that anything that you couldn't 'feel' could be wiped out fairly easily with an aggressive pad and a decent speed on the DAS6?


I feel a little underwhelmed. Overall the polisher is covering up things, I'm sure, but they're so few and far between that it's not really noticeable at all. It looks like the Rav4 did when i hand polished it (it looks great. Clarity is massively improved, but any defects that remain stand out like a sore thumb, and as the polisher isn't doing an excellent job of covering them up in the first place, they're all standing out!)


That said, though, I have been staring at the car all day. Maybe my opinion will be changed when I've a fresh look in the morning.

I forgot my camera (again!) so all I have are crap phone photos.

In the below, the bonnet was done to the halfway mark (ignore the masking tape, that was for an earlier photo with the camera). Polished on the left side (incase it isn't obvious.. it wasn't that obvious in person, to be honest).




Claying the car seems to have made a bigger difference than polishing it (so far). But I've got glaze and wax yet to go on, too, so..


Beading shot... (well.. whatever the opposite is to beading...)






So tomorrow I've to finish polishing, wash it (2BM), apply glaze, rinse and dry, and then apply wax. I think I will hand wax. But machine glaze (is there a difference, really, as to how you apply it)?


Oh, in relation to the door edge on the driver side:




I've sanded down the rough area (not that it made much difference) and applied some touch up paint. I did 2 coats and will do another in the morning before trying to sand it down again for polishing. If it comes out okay, I'll try the same on the busted areas on the flat at the side of the car. Figure I may aswell be somewhat responsible and do a relatively inconspicuous area before throwing paint all over the side of it, where it'll be much more noticeable).

Tried two polishes (both were much the same. in fact pretty much identical). They are Meguiar's #105 Ultra Cut Compound and Chemical Guy's Pro Polish 3N.

(I used 3N on the right side of the bonnet, but i hadn;t got it done in that photo, obviously). I figured maybe the Meguiar's stuff was just pretty poor, so tried the 3N instead, but when i seen the results were so similar i switched back to using meguiars for the rest.

What I did was apply it in dabs/blots/whatever term you want to use, onto the DAS pad. Tap the pad around the area im going to polish (to distribute little blobs of polish), then rub the polish in (all while the DAS is off).

Then I turned it on, onto number 2, and run it around the area. After doing this about a half dozen times, I moved up to number 5 or 6 (highest setting on it) and tried to 'work' the polish into the paintwork using several techniques (from covering the area in quick strokes, to slow, barely moving ones, with varying levels of pressure, etc. after this I brought it back down to 2 and covered the area again a couple of times. Then I used a microfibre cloth to buff off the residue left behind.

MetzgerMeister wrote: »

Ahm.....if you polish that new paint after spraying it, it will all come off again.

Just sayin'!

That's a risk I'm willing to take!

Though it was applied by brush (so even more likely to come flying off!)

MetzgerMeister wrote: »

It's not a risk, it's a certainty.

So long as it doesn't take the door off the car with it, I'll live. :pac:

toastedpickles wrote: »

Yeah but then you'l notice it every time you see the car and go " If i had just left that piece there alone it'd look so much better"

Trust me! I know!

If it takes the paint off, I'll just continue on anyway with my polishing, glazing and waxing. I have the tub of paint still there for whenever I want it, so I can re-apply it after I'm finished (or a few days or weeks or such down the line).

It won't be the end of the world, and I don't think it'll end up looking much worse than it was, anyway. Besides, it's a practice car for the sole purpose of making these mistakes :P may aswell be a bit adventurous.

After my polishing efforts, I decided I'd try out one of the more obscure things I'd heard. I have bumper/trim products, but felt like a bit of peanut butter would do no harm (as it's only 99c in tesco for a giant jar of it that'd do a pro detailer about a year!).


And... it works! Relatively.

On the grey/silver trim, it did nothing at all. However, on the black areas (wing mirror area, rubber sealing around windscreen, wipers, etc.) it did a decent job, to be fair to it. I'm sure it's less than temporary, and if anything it will probably just cause hassle when i use the proper products tomorrow, but sure I felt like i had to try it out.


Peanut butter jelly time on the Mirror (on the flat part that the mirror is connected to on the car, and on the matte trim around the front of the mirror's edge)








(there's a pretty big area on the trim on the mirrors edge that looks completely whited out. It's just the way the ceiling lights came up on it in the photos. It's actually matte grey all the way around).



I also went nuts (geddit!?) on the grill at the front of the car:








On the first day, some of you will remember I complained about the fabric interior not being clean enough, but also saying I forgot to take my camera home with me to upload photos. Here are two before and afters. There's an improvement, but in reality it's not as good as I feel it should be. So I'll be giving a round 2 on this before handing the car back.


(these weren't taken with a tripod, so they don't line up too well, at all, unfortunately).

Passenger Seat:









Driver Seat:








I think there's a significant room for improvement there! I've no decent photos of the back seats, but I'll get some.




So all in all, she's coming along nicely. Tomorrow is day 4, so hopefully the last day (but I doubt it, as I want to re-do the interior). I finished polishing today, messed with the peanut butter and glitz'ed the tyres, but I didn't take the car out of the shed, as the weather was poor and it was too dark by the time i wanted to.

The car is destroyed in dust from hex-logic pads, masking tape, etc. so it needs a 2BM, rinse and dry before I can do anything else. Next steps are glazing and waxing. Re-apply tyre shine (hopefully give a bit of extra pop to the tyre sidewall appearance) and do the interior are optionals that I'll likely do anyway. Glass needs to be done, too.


But, in-person, it's looking a **** lot better than it did a week ago.





And a quick self-portrait to show the reflection (not to self; If already obese - don't take photo in wide panel that further stretches you!)