Thanks: 0
Likes: 0
Dislikes: 0
-
Super Member
EVIL Black ZL1 - Repaint - Orange Peel/Sanding Marks/Hologram Removal & CQuartz Finest
THE NAME....people....said it ALL...
About 3 weeks ago while working on ANOTHER black 2013 ZL1 - I checked my phone and saw i had 2 calls from the same #. I though dang, someone wants to talk to me. Then I got another call at that same instant....I picked up and after introducing himself...and telling me he has a Black ZL1 Camaro ...he went on to say "I was told if anyone can save my car it's you guys"
...Yeah no pressure!
The owner went on to tell me that with under 3k miles...that his whole front bumper and the pop outs of the rear quarter panels (the ribbed areas) were covered with 100's of chips. This didn't surprise me since this paint seemed EXTRA soft (we found that out from the one we were currently working on at the time!) So, under warranty he had the front bumper and the sides (Front QP, doors, Rear QP...basically everything but the hood/roof/trunk) repainted.
Yes....repainted
Repainted cars are notorious for a few things....especially black ones...
Yeah...holograms...buffing trails....wool pad marks
These guys were thorough. Not only did they buff the repainted areas..they buffed the WHOLE DAMN CAR.
Ok, ok....thats not really true. See they did manage to actually MISS some areas completely and just leave the sanding marks there instead:
I mean really....whats a few sanding marks going to do...no big deal right?
You can only see it in the light...who cares about that!
The owner was probably just "one of those people"...you know...picky ones who want everything perfect. What nut would be worried about this on his car...i mean it's black after all and black just CANT be polished right?
They did a little art work....rotary buffer ghost flames:
By the way i lied.....they didnt just leave buffer marks...or sanding marks where they DIDNT buff...some spots well...they just didn't even sand.
"Didn't sand?" you might think...."Like what?"
Well...kinda like this drip right here:
I know i know...its just a little drip...hard to see. But you may notice a certain...reflection...or lack there of...around that drip. You know...a little peely peel if you will:
Ok maybe more than a little...maybe more like the whole area infront of the wheels on the bumper:
Do the wave!!!
*Sigh*...ok i'm having flash backs going through these pics...not good ones either. Anyway...back to my story. So...what the owner wanted to know was...could we save his car. Could we get it back to at least OEM condition. My reaction was...let us look at it first. We'll be straight with you..tell you what CAN be done...and what CANT be done. That's exactly what he wanted to hear...we spoke a bit more...he expressed in a pretty detailed fashion how displeased he was...then we hung up and i told him I'd be in touch.
But wait, remember those other 2 calls? Well...that was from a guy at the dealership...calling about the same car. This guy tried everything he could to get his guys to do the right thing with the paint job...he knew it wasn't right...he knew the owner wasn't going to be happy with it....but you can't do what you don't know...and these guys didn't know how to finish paint (or sand some of it either for that matter).
I spoke with him for a bit...we agreed to the same thing, Dani and I would go check it out, find out if it was doable or not...and then go from there.
After checking out the car...we called the owner...told him most of it we could fix, the exception being...some very small fish eyes we found here n' there. But the rest....we believed we could save...with the exception of ONE area....that damn front bumper I mentioned earlier. THAT...was our main question.
I told him when we first walked up that "We walked up to the bumper and put our light on it and we were like, is it even..." The owner ....in perfect harmony with me said "Even black!!!"
Yes, we weren't sure if it was even black lol. Why? Well cause it looked like this...
No this was not just a little road dirt...this was in the paint. We tried washing, clay barring and even compounding...it said nuh-uh. Not to mention the fact that it had the reflection of old asphalt. We hoped we could save it, but wouldn't know until we gave it a shot.
We arranged a drop off time and set aside from Friday afternoon to Monday afternoon for this car...it was going to be...a #####...period.
What to do in a situation like this? Well, you call the man himself, Mr Buff Daddy Buff Daddy - Kevin Brown. I spoke with kev a few times (once we finally quit playing phone tag!) He told me he'd send me all the discs i needed...gave me some advice on how best to use them and said anything i don't use just send back. His advice was greatly appreciated AND used...so just a quick shout out to him for this. Both before and during the detail..he was on standby for us if we had any questions/concerns. Which I did in a couple of circumstances...and he was there to help us out whenever needed.
The day before drop off...we received a package that was enough to "Totally sand down 2 full Corvettes!" as he put it lol. And it was!
But before we could get to that fun stuff...we had some clean up to do....there were also some water spots left all over...but not on the paint:
Yeah all these TIGHT little vents were covered in hard water spots.
The back had the same deal:
I lied, they left some on the paint too...cause its hard to pop the trunk and just wipe under the spoiler edge:
Little compound dust here n' there along with some good stuff caked deep into some body lines:
And of course the usual dirty exhaust tips...this thing IS a Super Charged ZL1 after all...and is pushing 715 HP from what the owner told me so...yeah..this is kind of expected lol:
Now first thing was first on this thing...washing it and removing any fillers. Yeah those pics above....are PRE-WASH. We pre-sprayed each panel with Power Clean though and it removed anything on the paint quite easily. Next up...the owner asked if we would mind removing the badges for him as well...so thats what we did:
Well Dani mostly did lol...I did a couple.
-
Super Member
-
Super Member
Re: EVIL Black ZL1 - Repaint - Orange Peel/Sanding Marks/Hologram Removal & CQuartz Finest
Bingo...
Compounding haze had to be removed...but the sanding marks were gone.
And for that old drip...i was able to almost completely knock it down...you had to get right ontop of it to see it...but this was as far as i felt comfortable going with it:
We worked and worked and worked through the day. Where normally we'd be making faster pace..things like deep sanding marks in tight groves or on sharp body lines took us extra time. Rather slow and successful than fast and a failure.
Finally reaching towards the back...it was time to cut under the spoiler...cause yes...even UNDER the spoiler itself needed work...we were able to get it into good shape too:
At this point...we were reaching exhaustion. Officially starting to WORK a little after 8 a.m and only pausing for drinks and then 20 minutes to go in and have "breakfast" at noon lol...we were running off our 5th wind and decided to call it a night around 10 p.m
Dani was hanging in till the very end....i couldn't get a good angle on that spoiler...so she had to hold it in place while i was cutting it. She wasn't asleep...jump blinking during the pic lol..but yea, we were both pretty tired:
So what do you do after a long days work? You wake up early again and put in even MORE hours the next day! On to the other side...more sanding and the compounding...i had to work the rotary on some spots:
And again...had to work the very slightest of edges by hand:
While i was doing that...Dani went around to do a thorough clean on the wheels/wheel wells to prep them for DLux coating...but she ran into a little problem:
Bodyshop dust and/or over spray had covered the wheels..especially on the passenger side. For this we decided it had to take a back seat for now because we NEEDED to get this paint DONE. So they were cleaned...tires were dressed...but no coating on the wheels for now..the owner will return for us to remove the over spray and get them coated.
I moved my way to the front bumper...this was the most damned area of the whole car...the big question mark we had in the back of our minds was finally about to be addressed:
Could we remove this speckled mess? There was only one way to find out...
I did a test spot...went for 1500 right off cause anything finer just wasn't going to do it in a timely manner. The followed it up with some 3000 Megs Unigrit to refine it down. Again..slow and easy was the pace...i cut the test area...it looked good...REAL good. Peel, dust specks...all removed...there was REFLECTION!
So, i continued on, leveling, refining...and cutting. Here was half the bumper sanded still...but the other half had been compounded...look...gloss:
And reflection...nice crisp reflection:
Things were going pretty good! It was super time consuming because i had to sand that bumper area ALL the way down to the very bottom parts where it met the plastic nose piece...but i did it...and then had the fun of removing the sanding marks...but did that too..and it was coming out awesome.
Dani was busting her butt on the passenger side, compounding it like she had the drivers side the day before. After i finished up my bumper duties, i hopped up top to work the roof of the passenger side:
And as we continued, we KEPT running into these damn things. MORE sanding marks/pig tails left from the dealership...and where? Right in the hardest damn places to cut them out. Like...in the grove where the hip meets the vertical panel:
God thats ugly...
But, we pushed through...and finally got to the point of polishing. We went through...and did a final polish on the whole car. These damn cars a big...lots of paint..plenty of odd sharp angles to try to get a pad into ...and...its black.
That night we go to the point of prepping the paint for CQuartz Finest. We had applied it on Dani's car a week prior and well...it looked AWESOME. So this ZL1 was going to get the same treatment.
The hard part? Well..the OEM paint was VERY finicky ...even when using Eraser to remove the oils...one bad wipe...one piece of whatever caught in your towel..and it was towel marring city. The other thing we found was...in a couple of very small spots on a few panels..there was light micro-marring left over that we had missed. Whats that mean? We polish it again...even if it IS 10 p.m and we've been going at it over 12 hours a
Dani said i looked like a deer in headlights here...
Touching up my half of the roof too:
Gotta realize, polishing the defects is only part of the battle....SEEING them..especially super faint micro-marring...is the other part.
Carefully wiping down with Eraser:
Yeah it was pushing 11 P.M now...we had killed the fans in the garage because we wanted NO dust on the car when it got time to coat...can you tell i was sweating?
Now it was time....
Honestly at that point in time when i got the box...the two blue swooshes in the upper right hand corner looked like more holograms to me...i was a little loopy and tired at that point lol..but we had to coat it!
To apply the coating it took about 50 minutes. I try to be super thorough and EVEN when coating...first you go across the paint...then you go again in the direction you want the water to flow (WITH the direction of the car basically)...then you let the coating sit:
It looks kinda streaky/rainbow-ish ...but its the icing on the cake once its removed.
I continued along:
-
Super Member
-
Super Member
-
Super Member
-
Super Member
Sucks a brand new paint job came like that from the factory!
Sent from my SPH-M930 using AG Online
2022 Elantra N Cyber Gray
Some say..."He likes Swedish fish because they're made with caranuba wax"
-
Super Member
Re: EVIL Black ZL1 - Repaint - Orange Peel/Sanding Marks/Hologram Removal & CQuartz Finest
Unbelievable job and results!
Stunning work.
-
Super Member
Re: EVIL Black ZL1 - Repaint - Orange Peel/Sanding Marks/Hologram Removal & CQuartz Finest
Originally Posted by Klasse Act
Sucks a brand new paint job came like that from the factory!
Sent from my SPH-M930 using AG Online
Well, not really...if you read it, i say that the front and sides were all repainted at the dealership, not the factory. Then they buffed it and WOW...
Originally Posted by cartman57
Unbelievable job and results!
Stunning work.
Thank you...and sorry for the pics doubling up in some spots, not sure what happened...Photobucket fail!
-
Junior Member
Similar Threads
-
By Mike Phillips in forum How to articles
Replies: 57
Last Post: 03-19-2021, 03:45 PM
-
By 3wood in forum Auto Detailing 101
Replies: 7
Last Post: 10-15-2018, 01:42 PM
-
By allenk4 in forum Show N' Shine
Replies: 34
Last Post: 11-13-2014, 12:59 PM
-
By Mike Phillips in forum Rotary Buffers
Replies: 24
Last Post: 01-26-2012, 08:59 AM
-
By minion99 in forum Off-Topic
Replies: 17
Last Post: 02-21-2008, 10:04 PM
Members who have read this thread: 0
There are no members to list at the moment.
Posting Permissions
- You may not post new threads
- You may not post replies
- You may not post attachments
- You may not edit your posts
-
Forum Rules
|
S |
M |
T |
W |
T |
F |
S |
25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 |
1
|
2
|
3
|
4
|
5
|
6
|
7
|
8
|
9
|
10
|
11
|
12
|
13
|
14
|
15
|
16
|
17
|
18
|
19
|
20
|
21
|
22
|
23
|
24
|
25
|
26
|
27
|
28
|
29
|
30
|
31
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
|
Bookmarks