Black 1990 Skyline GTR get a showcar detailing!

[sunstealth]

Superb job there cobraa the car looks stunning, And I think depending on where youre from I could even watch that car live (we are living in the same province and i would like to try out those manzerna polishes one day )

[cobraa]

Wow that's amazing. It looks like a totally different car. That made me wonder if it is possible to have a side business flipping cars like they flip houses. Buy cheap, fix up, and resale at a profit. Find a great deal on a late model car with sound mechanics but old looking, neglected interior and exterior. Do an amazing restoration job like the OP did here and then a couple days later resale for a profit. I mean seriously that finished car easily looks $1,000 dollars better.

Just curious, how much would you estimate it cost you in supplies and time to do that restoration?

I totally agree but depending where you lives, there's law that can stop you from reselling more than X cars a year. Also, you better have a big yard HAHA but yeah, a detailing can sometimes totally change a car and if you like the color, it can almost be like a new paintjob.

[Superior_Details]

great job, what a turn out

[cobraa]

great job, what a turn out

thanks guys!!

I should be able to update this threads with new pics!!

(I've been real busy but since i started using other products than just AG's products, I didn't want to get my post/thread deleted)

[cobraa]

Okay i'm about to drop the *bomb*... till then first part here!!

Une version française va possiblement venir au fur et à mesure, mais au moment d'écrire ce thread, j'ai décidé de le faire en une langue seulement car je crois que j'en ai BEAUCOUP à dire et la traduction couperait le beat solide de la progression de mon thread !

So... what happened since 2010 when this thread/car won best of show thread from Autogeek's staff ? Well.. I simply maintained the car while the car attended some car show. The car had little respray due to new addition like greddy rear spat and M3 mirror style. I had to match the orange peel with the rest of the car but nothing major.

In 2011-12, Chemical guys gave us a free pot of Chemical Guys Celeste dettaglio V2 to thanks us for letting them use some of our pictures for their new ads. Cool! Another ''award'' from this detail

And there comes 2013... CATASTROPHE!! The car had his fender rolled.. However 2 fender out of 4 cracked.. leaving paint cracked and not looking too pretty.. the rear spat fitting done by the bodyshot wasnt too pretty... Long story short, about 40% of the car got resprayed! So, I didn't get to detail the car before the respray was done. Make sens right ?

Then.. the day the respray happened, the color-match was HORRIBLE!!! I mean seriously horrible... So, the painter agreed to re-do the job and apologize. However it took 3 weeks due to vacation and busy week. fast forward 3 weeks later.. I finally got to see the car repainted correctly, but with nasty orange peel :

If you don't know what orange peel are, they are pretty common when you get bodyshop work done on your car, you will get these kind of reflection from the paint. Sometimes it's worse than other and depending on the color of the car it show less or more. So think about an orange and how wavy the peel is.. and now look at these pictures:




Look closely at the reflection of the wall and the sky on the trunk.. can't you see the reflection is wavy and not clear ?

And now... does one side appears to be MUCH MORE clear than the other ?




And now here's a close up...

orange peel :



No orange peel ( or very minimal) crystal clear reflection :


To achieve this kind of finish, we need to go through an exhaustive process that takes hours to achieve. We first need to wet-sand the paint using a ''coarse'' grit ( coarse for finishing paint but not coarse if you were to perform bodyshop job like grinding paint!) to actually level the paint by knocking off the peel effect on the paint. Imagine the paint as a mountain.. every high spot is actually what we call the peel/wavy effect. What I need to do is sand those mountain/high spot to level the paint so that I obtain a paint that doesn't have any high-spot. Like this:



After that you will realize that some contamination might have stuck INTO the paint.. that's what we call ''grain''. It's actually small dust particle that get trap on the paint during the paint curing inside the paint booth. So far from what I saw.. no matter how hard the bodyshop try to avoid them, they're will always be a few trap on the paint. To correct this, you need to use another speciality tools with coarser grit paper that will knock these grits individually: ( this process can be very long!)




Once everything is done.. meaning the orange peel is removed and we achieved an uniform ''matte'' looking paint, it's time to refinish the paint using a finer coarse paper. Usually these paper will have a foam backing so they will contours the mountain instead of ''knocking them'' and leveling them. The problem with the first and second step is that the paint is very hazy/matte looking. In order to bring back the shine, you need to refinish the paint ; this means that the finer grit will be able to remove the coarser grit I just put on the paint. ( ie: If you have #1000 grit, you need a #2000 grit to remove the #1000 grit and then, you could use a #3000 or #5000 grit to remove the #2000 grit you created before). So this is how the paint looked after a #3000 grit pass:


Remember how it looked once fully polished ?


Oh gosssshh!! isn't that pretty ? Some ferrari and uber-expensive car don't even have that kind of clarity in their paint!

As you can see, the problem with wet-sanding is not to level the paint or remove the orange peel, the real challenge ( and this is what set a part the real detailer to the ''other'') is to finish the paint to a PERFECT finish without leaving any compounding haze, small dust particle, pigtail, sanding mark etc.

So after I was done with the trunk, I started working the rear fender:



And I was done for the day......................................

Well not exactly..........

1 hour later after leaving the bodyshop. this happened:








#### !!!!!!

So basicly, we had to respray the car twice to get it done, I already worked 5-6 hours into the paint and then comes this accident... The damage ?

- corner light
- headlight
- rebar
- leaking intercooler
- destroyed bumper
- bended frame


Someone offered to repair the fiberglass bumper, he said he would do the rought part and then a bodyshop would just have to sand it and put some body filler and prep it:




Well.. after doing 3 different bodyshop, not one wanted to work with this bumper, they all said the repair was too rought and not worth going over. they would have to start over.. Oh great! More time and money wasted.

Then someone offered to trade a headlight to help the owner repair his car. Next thing we knew is that Nissan decided to make 2 different type of headlight in the little 5 yr timespan the R32 existed. As you can see here, notice the DRL not the same and one take H3C while the other take H1:



So while the headlight were out, I was asked to paint the inside of the light black instead of chrome to achieve a meaner look:

Looking prettier isn't ?




It took me about 5 hours to do.. remove the cover, polish inside the cover with a glass polish, polish the outside with a glass polish and glass polishing pad, sand the chrome and give multiple coat of paint, then I had to re-seal the cover with urethane we use at my shop for windshield. You think we were done hen!??!

Well no... i left the headlight on my drying machine and went to grab my camera to take some pictures, when I was in my room I heard a big '' smash''.... yes... one headlight fall off the drying machine and the cover being glass.. broke again!!! Believe it or not.. I had to supply another glass cover because it was totally my fault.. Basicly, I didn't make a penny doing this mod..

Rebar was bought at a JDM shop, Intercooler were upgraded to a bigger Greddy unit, corner light were replaced for a pair of smoked clear corner by jdmgarage.

Now into the bend frame... we went to a bodyshop i don't wish to name on the south shore of montreal ( but maybe I should...) and they took the car 2 months to fix the frame... Here's how the car came back to the bodyshop:

Hood hinge could barely close, headlight was still 1 inch pushed inside the hood. nothing aligned right, huge gap between the headlight and corner light.. What we latter found out is that they simply shimmed the fender and other parts of the body to make it ''close'' but that it!! What a fuckin shame... and they call them professional bodyshop...

oh and they also did this beautiful glue job free of charge........


In the mean time, the rear bumper got damaged from someone.. maybe at the bodyshop!


So imagine how the owner felt ; He used to have a uber-clean skyline and out of a sudden, he get 2 respray because the first one isnt done right. Then, he try to fix the bumper but have to be redone, get his headlight done and then by accident i smash one, then he get his frame fixed and learn that he have to get it redone... what a shitty year!!
Beside maybe this funny moment lol.. We shared a pic bumper-less with a Veyron :P



So the car went into storage like that....

Part 1 done... stay tuned for part 2 ( which is what was done for 2014!)

[cobraa]

a new thread has been created ( in order to offer a cleaner thread) but here's it is for your reference !

here's the thread:

R32 GTR skyline | zero orange peel project : 100 hours detail/body |

[Mizzoutiger]

Great writeup; thanks for sharing!

[tigerwash]

That is beyond a detail! One hell of a restoration you did there! Nice job

[allenk4]

I totally agree but depending where you lives, there's law that can stop you from reselling more than X cars a year. Also, you better have a big yard HAHA but yeah, a detailing can sometimes totally change a car and if you like the color, it can almost be like a new paintjob.

I have a Friend who turns a few cars a year

He looks for newer cars that have an exploded transmission or blown gasket

He says that's where the money is, because no one will pay squat for a car that isn't running

You also have to have "A Guy" who can do the shadetree special at a reasonable price during his off hours

My friend is a Service Coordinator at a Dealership and pays one of their mechanics an hourly rate

[cobraa]

Great writeup; thanks for sharing!

That is beyond a detail! One hell of a restoration you did there! Nice job

thank you guys, glad you liked it

I have a Friend who turns a few cars a year

He looks for newer cars that have an exploded transmission or blown gasket

He says that's where the money is, because no one will pay squat for a car that isn't running

You also have to have "A Guy" who can do the shadetree special at a reasonable price during his off hours

My friend is a Service Coordinator at a Dealership and pays one of their mechanics an hourly rate

theres def. money to be made, I know, as ironical it may sound, i hate mechanic, i have zero patience for stuck bolt and tight area where most spanner wont fit, i just cant...loll !! but give me a car and ask me to detail it for 30 hours.. no worries!! :P