Some Vintage Meguiar's Products from my Collection (Lots of pictures)

[BobbyG]

Mike that's quite a collection!

Can you imagine the history those bottles and cans have been through? Talk about a stroll down memory lane!!

[pzero7]

I have never seen probably 99% of all the things you posted. Those are some really cool looking collection you have there. thanks for sharing Mike!

[BillyJack]

Really cool stuff, Mike. Having a father and uncle in the repair business, I've been around dealerships and body shops for almost 50 years and never spied any Meg's products in a glass bottle. My first exposure to Meguiar's was in 1971 as a teenager. I rebuilt a totaled '67 Malibu and my uncle painted it a copper color. Since he didn't yet trust me with a rotary, I color sanded it and rubbed it all by hand-what a chore!
I went looking for some kind of safe glaze at the local parts store to bring up the shine on the fresh paint, and found Meguiar's "Competition Finish". I think it was kinda like 3M Fill & Glaze. Great stuff on a metallic lacquer finish. I believe it was in a black bottle. Have you ever seen any?

Bill

[Mike Phillips]

Mike, wasn't the Sealer and Reseal glaze considered a LSP product at one time in its life?

It was by Frank Meguiar's Jr., the founder of Meguiar's. Here's what I've been told and this may be the first time I've ever shared this in any media...

Frank Meguiar's Jr. only believed in using products that were actually beneficial to the coating on the coating. In his opinion, wax wasn't good or necessary for auto paints because it caused refinishing problems. The idea being that if you polished OFTEN with a non-abrasive pure polish like the #7 Sealer and Reseal Glaze that you could maintain the finish without wax.

This is true.

The problem is most people are to busy to polish often, at least often enough to maintain a single stage paint and that's the context of this topic as it relates to Frank Meguiar Jr. as that was the paint used in his days.

The other issue was because Meguiar's didn't introduce a car wax until 1951, after his passing in 1950, that what was taking place was people would use Meguiar's paint cleaners and polishes to clean and polish their car's paint but then they would have to use some other company's wax to seal the paint because Meguiar's didn't offer a wax.

So to Frank Meguiar, and probably to some degree Malcolm Meguiar and the what I call, Meguiar's Purist", #7 Sealer and Reseal Glaze, (no called Show Car Glaze), was an LSP or Last Step Product. Note LSP doesn not stand for Last Step Protectant, as in a paint sealant, I should know... I coined the term.

LSP - The definition and the story behind the term

I have never seen probably 99% of all the things you posted. Those are some really cool looking collection you have there. thanks for sharing Mike!

I know people with more and better antique bottle collections but they don't interact on forums and they likely don't posses the skills to properly photograph their bottles and then,

• Crop
• Resize
• Upload
• Insert

their product photos into threads on discussion forums. I do. I don't believe having really cool antique bottles is very beneficial if they are not shared... thus I created a forum group on MOL called, "Blast from the Past" where I shared my collection and also any pictures I was able to take of other guys collections.

Some people that have cool old bottle just don't have the time or inclination to do all the work and steps it takes to get the pictures into a thread like this to share them with you.

Since I understand that a lot of people don't know how to work with photos on forums, I have a number of "how to" articles on these topics on both MOL and here an AG. Pictures are worthless unless you learn how to get them off the memory card and into a thread in a viewable size that won't later turn into a Red X's

Here's the articles I've written for AG, they can be found in my articles list.

Photography and Working with Pictures on the Internet

How-To capture swirls, scratches, etchings and other surface defects with your camera

How-To capture swirls, scratches, etchings and other surface defects with your camera

How-to work with pictures on discussion forums

How to upload a photo into your Autogeek Photo Gallery

How to insert an image from your photo gallery into your message

How to crop out the fluff and resize your pictures! - Using FREE online software!


You can find the ones I've written for MOL here,

Forum related how-to articles

Really cool stuff, Mike. Having a father and uncle in the repair business, I've been around dealerships and body shops for almost 50 years and never spied any Meg's products in a glass bottle.

Back when they were the norm, after they were empty most people would simply throw them away just like we throw away our plastic used up bottles. I could share a real horror story about the destruction of a lot of antique glass bottles but choose not to.

My first exposure to Meguiar's was in 1971 as a teenager. I rebuilt a totaled '67 Malibu and my uncle painted it a copper color. Since he didn't yet trust me with a rotary, I color sanded it and rubbed it all by hand-what a chore!

Was it lacquer or enamel?

I went looking for some kind of safe glaze at the local parts store to bring up the shine on the fresh paint, and found Meguiar's "Competition Finish". I think it was kinda like 3M Fill & Glaze. Great stuff on a metallic lacquer finish. I believe it was in a black bottle. Have you ever seen any?

Bill

I don't think I have that bottle but I think Mike Pennington might... there maybe a picture of it in the Blast from the Past forum... I don't know off-hand.


Most of the work I've done on forums is always more of the serious nature, that is helping people solve appearance problems with their projects... but it's important to have a little fun too so I like to share pictures of some of the cool old bottles I have in my collection and I've had the opportunity to take of other people's collections.

[Larry A]

Mike , I have a few more questions1, Many years ago a friend show me to bottles of Meguiars products One was the #7 glaze, the other was a bright blue liquid that he said was a liquid wax from Meguiars. This was in the late 60s before cleaner wax was brought out. #2, In the 1940s Meguiars made a product called 1-16-C ,I though that it was a cleaner-wax. Can you tell me what it was .Sorry Im just courious about old stuff.

[BillyJack]

Was it lacquer or enamel?

It was lacquer. At the time (early 70's), lacquer was the preferred paint for a good finish. You just couldn't get enamels to have comparable depth and gloss. Here's an old pic from 1972 of my work.







Bill

[Mike Phillips]

It was lacquer. At the time (early 70's), lacquer was the preferred paint for a good finish. You just couldn't get enamels to have comparable depth and gloss.

Completely understand, I was just asking to verify and to add this...

There's a descriptive saying that goes,

"Hand rubbed lacquer finish"

The reason this saying exists is because you can literally hand rub out lacquer paint because it's soft.

You don't hear the term,

"Hand rubbed basecoat/clearcoat finish"

And the reason for this is because in the 1980's paint resin technology changed and the paints became harder, not softer.

The practical differences between single stage paints and a clear coat paints


When I first joined CorvetteForum.com, all the gurus over there were always talking about how soft the paint on new Corvettes was and still is and that's why they scratched so easily but they, like many, confused "Scratch Sensitive" with paint softness.

The fact is, modern clear coats are much harder than traditional solvent-evaporation paints like Lacquer and Enamel and while modern clear coats are much harder than paints from before 1980, they still scratch very easily but because they are harder, working them out is more difficult especially by hand, thus the reason tools like the Porter Cable have become so popular over the last 20+ years now since Meguiar's introduced the PC to the enthusiast market starting the early 1990's.

Paints have changed, paint care products have changed, and obtaining quality information on how to use paint care products to work on paint has changed with the introduction of a little chunk of software called vBulletin.

Discussion Forums - A relatively "new" invention...


Thanks for sharing some of your early work Bill... very cool you still have some pictures...

[mg6045]

wow, Interesting pictures !

I did not realize Megs has made products that were so defined back them. I figured back them, the offering would be along the lines of, "shine in a bottle" lol.

[Mike Phillips]

Mike , I have a few more questions, Many years ago a friend show me to bottles of Meguiars products One was the #7 glaze, the other was a bright blue liquid that he said was a liquid wax from Meguiars. This was in the late 60s before cleaner wax was brought out.

The only bright blue product I know of was Meguiar products, not Meguiar's products. These are the Black Sheep products, they were introduced by a Meguiar's family member and made by Meguiar's but it was a different family member than Frank Jr., Malcolm and Barry.

I have a few of these products in my collection as well as some print ads that go with them, they are fairly rare, especially the paste waxes as the lids would glue onto the jar and most people broke them up to get them open.

Here's some from my collection... the product inside the bottles with the blue racing stripe is blue, but probably not as bright as it was in the 1960's

#2, In the 1940s Meguiars made a product called 1-16-C ,I though that it was a cleaner-wax.
Can you tell me what it was .Sorry I'm just curious about old stuff.

No problemo Larry... can you name another forum where you can get this kind of information?

My friend, Tom McDonald has a jug of this product and I included it in the first page of this thread but it's hard to see the numbers, here it is again, look closely and I can try to see if I have a better picture of it on my old laptop.

[TLMitchell]

...while modern clear coats are much harder than paints from before 1980, they still scratch very easily but because they are harder, working them out is more difficult

That's an interesting explanation on why I've been tearing my hair out. The clear (actually a clear powdercoat, I've learned) on many Harleys acquires swirls incredibly easily. However it polishes out more like a medium hard clearcoat. And that's primarily on the painted tin, the fiberglass parts don't swirl easily at all! The metal and fiberglass come from different plants, I suppose that may explain the differences. :shrug:

Removing the swirls without marring was an exercise in frustration until I started trying unorthodox combinations. A finishing polish with a cutting pad or a finishing pad with M105 produces the best results. Go figure!

Scratch X v1 worked incredibly well by hand before it disappeared. I found some old stock and grabbed a few tubes. H-D has their own branded Swirl & Scratch Remover in an identical black tube... the product looks, smells and works the same as the original Scratch X. Makes me think it may be a licensed, relabeled product.

Perhaps I ought to hang on to those v1 tubes, they'll become a "vintage product" one day. My collection has begun!

TL