Well this one had been on the cards for some time thanks to Damon at 'Detail Finish'. He very kindly invited me over to help out on a very very special car. The car was previously owned by JK from Jamiroquai as seen in some of his videos
Anyway, the car is used regularly and isn't just a garage queen and as such even though it was very good by usual standards it did require a bit of TLC.
Typically I turned up slightly late
so the car had just been washed.
Wash:
No need for a complete pre-wash so the car was simply washed using two buckets, lambswool mitts and Carlack shampoo, before drying with Sonus Ultimate Drying Towels.
Arches and alloys cleaned using Carlack Special Cleaner.
These were slightly easier to get at than on a normal car, so whilst they were up, we dressed them with Sonus Motor Kote.
Note the swirling evident on the door
Engine:
The owner liked to work on the car himself so didn't want any products putting onto the engine, so it was simply wiped down with a damp microfibre. The custom stainless steel exhausts were hand polished using NXT Metal Polish. Extreme care was taken not to knock the rear clamshell support. We were informed this piece alone was worth in excess of £50,000
Interior:
All the 'glass' is infact plastic on the F40, so we bought in some Swissol 'Vinyl Clear Kit' specially for the task. It did preform very well especially on the rear window/intakes.
(Again swirling and hazing apparant on roof and wing)
Clay:
The car didn't have much in the way of contamination, however it was very slightly rough to the touch so using Sonus Green clay with plenty of care we clayed the whole car. The bonnet was probably the worst and had reminants of dead insects embedded into it which had also etched the paint quite badly in places.
Polish:
We then masked as much of the car off as possible using 3M's blue 3838 masking tape. before inspecting for swirls and defects.
The first thing that was very apparant was how thin the paint was. Being a carbon fibre weave all over you could actually see this through the paint :doublesho This also meant we couldn't use paint thickness guages to measure how much we had to work with.
There was plenty of defects covering the whole car with the front bonnet being by far the worst mainly due to the etching from the insects. What was really shocking was it became apparant that at soime point in it's life someone had used a water blade on it and as such there were some pretty long (12" plus) scratches that we really couldn't risk trying to remove.
After testing many different polish and pad combinations on the bonnet, we soon realised actually Ferrari paint is hard.
As normal we began with Menzerna Po106FF on a Sonus SFX pad which for the first time didn't really touch it. I tried a few more combinations before I had success with a Menzerna Compounding Pad using Intensive Polish PO85RD3.01. This even with a compounding pad was leaving a very very glossy finish. The problem was the car was big and time was ticking by. As such after some deliberation we setteled on Damon using a rotary with me following round with PO85RD for the full on gloss.
So the final products were:
- Makita 9227CB polisher
- Meguairs Soft Buff Polishing Pad
- Menzerna Intensive Polish PO85RD3.01
- Porter Cable
- Sonus SFX-3 Finishing Pad
- Menzerna PO85RD
All the fiddly bits were done with Carlack Hand Polish Combo of the Scratch remover Paste followed by the Polishing paste applied as usual with a Sonus Professional Applicator. There was no was a machine was getting anywhere near some of the intakes!
Finally we went round with Swissol Cleaner Fluid applied by Rotary at 900rpm using a DAS blue, before buffing off and applying
Swissol Divine by hand :doublesho
The Divine was very very hard and took a lot of heat to get it soft and ready to apply to the paint. I think the effort was worth it though
Here are the afters:
All in all a very enjoyable and long day. Using the Swissol Divine was a real treat, but I think the car desrved it. Biggest thanks goes to Detail Finish though for inviting me over to partake in such a wonderful detail.
Cheers Tim
