Autogeek Ferrari paint correction at SEMA 2016

[OCDetails]

I'll tell you something... This car caused anxiety for just about everybody working in the Autogeek booth this year. It looked good from a far, but far from good. We were so fortunate to have this car in the booth from a local exotic car rental company (Beverly Hills Las Vegas Rentals). It was awesome to be able to show paint correction on a car with real world damage. Anybody can bring a black hood to polish on for 4 days, but the exhibitors who brought full cars to work on really had an advantage I think. Even the FLEX booth had a Porsche that Renny Doyle's team could sand a polish out with their machines and there was always a ton of traffic there too. But there is something about a nice red 2010 Ferrari 458 that drew people in from all over the place. People were taking pictures of it like crazy, but that is the 'good from a far' part. They were taking pictures of it with cameras a lot better than mine, so maybe it showed the flaws better, but I would have said this thing looked pretty good already.










Then again.... SEMA lighting is ridiculously unforgiving. To make it even worse, we had half a dozen LEDs pointed at it to really catch everything. This is what the paint actually looked like:









Now you can see why it was causing us anxiety!! All any of us wanted to do was spend the two or three hours we knew it would take to correct most of this car and then throw something on to protect it and send it on its way. I think every panel had been repainted at some point, so we knew correcting everything wasn't going to happen at the show, but a couple hours with the products we brought could surely improve it a little bit. Turns out that is exactly true.

We started cutting on it with Wolfgang Uber Compound and the Flex 3401 and an orange hybrid pad. It immediately transformed!! We cut different parts of the car with half a dozen other products and machines just to demonstrate, but getting crystal clear results with just the Uber Compound was awesome to see. It looked as good as that poor repainted Ferrari had probably ever looked. We left one side of the hood taped off and just the way it came to us all week. Then we polished it out finally on Friday and the car was awesome.

Just as a quick disclaimer, the cool thing about these pictures is that it is under the same light as the befores. I tried to get the same angles, but it is hard when the after pictures are days apart from the befores. It is also hard when your camera keeps trying to focus on the awesome reflections and it throws the color off. This thing was so shiny it was confusing my phone (LG G3).









These are the after pictures after applying Wolfgang Uber Coating to it. Holy cow was it ever shiny!!













The thing was so glossy that the camera started making the car purple. I know coatings have a tendency to change the color of the car, but this one went from orange to red to purple in a real hurry. Those of you who were there know what I'm talking about. It was an outstanding project. The best part was that people could see what it looked like before and they could relate. It probably looked like half the cars in the parking lot that are neglected in the Nevada sun and washed with really bad techniques.

It was such a pleasure to work with Mike and Nick and Bobby and Bryan on getting this car looking good again. I've polished with Mike before and obviously he is a master, but I came to realize that the rest of the staff there at Autogeek are every bit as talented and knowledgeable as Mike is about the products and process needed for the best results possible. Thank you so much for letting me work with you again! It was really an honor to be part of the Autogeek Fearrari Correction Team.

[coles_paint_correction]

Man what a turn around, awesome job guys on that one.
That hood shot before looked like a Brillo pad scrub.
Maybe next year i can make it to sema to check out all autogeek and others.

[WaxMaster1]

Gotta love the prancing horse!

[haris300]

Nice meeting you and the AG crew buddy. That paint was trashed. Glad to see it turned around.

[OCDetails]

Part of it was just a really bad repaint, but really REALLY bad washing process didn't help much either. It was really fun to use a variety of tools and products. That paint felt products from Flex, Rupes, Porter Cable, Griots, Wolfgang, and probably a few others. It was a great canvas. I highly recommend doing product demonstrations on a neglected exotic to increase traffic and interest in your booth.

[GSKR]

Looks great,probably by far the worst Ferrari paint condition I've ever seen.Being a rental has its bruises and someone destroyed the finish with a rotary.my guess is a Bodyshop looks great guys.

[OCDetails]

I didn't actually see much rotary damage. It looked like they had washed it with the scratcher end of the kitchen sponge and dried it with a sandy beach towel. The car literally changed colors after we got that first cut done on it. I thought the reflections were blurry because of the bad paint job, but despite the fact that it looked like they painted it out in the parking lot during a wind storm, the paint was actually not terribly orange peeled. The blur in the reflections was just oxidation and massive amounts of swirl.