Kurt_s
New member
- Dec 18, 2009
- 1,263
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Mike, very cool car!
How do you feel about Absorber?
- Thread starter slickooz
- Start date
Mike, very cool car!
Mike Phillips
Active member
- Dec 5, 2022
- 51,004
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I agree, incredibly cool.
It was designed by Terry Cook, former Editor of "Hot Rod Magazine", I toured with the car, Terry and the Absorber company for about a half a year and as a course of my duties buffed it out a number of times and then maintained it at all the shows. It was a true attention getter no matter what show it was featured at. I still have some of the featured show T-shirts and it was the feature car on all the shirts.
Terry Cook also designed and built the "Titanic" and it was through my relationship through the Absorber company and working on Scrape that Terry hired me to wetsand, cut and polish the Titanic.
This is one of those projects that everything was working against me and I almost didn't do it, but after arriving to Monterey, where the car was located, sitting down and eating some lunch and thinking about it I decided to go ahead and sand and buff the paint.
I shared a portion of the story here,
http://www.autogeekonline.net/forum/auto-detailing-101/20007-new-detailing-2.html
So I'll just copy and paste what I wrote there to here because it was a very cool car to work on, even more fun to drive around in and Terry's a great guy...
Locate and purchase a Brinkmann Dual Xenon Flashlight also known as a Cruel Master.
For $30.00 this light will highlight and reveal the swirls in the paint and let you know if you're efforts are getting you closer to the goal or further away.
Lighting is very important and do everything you can to work where you have good and even GREAT lighting so you can see what the heck you're doing.
A number of years ago Terry Cook, former Editor of Hot Rod Magazine had me wet-sand, cut and buff The Titanic about 2 months after it was painted Liberace Lavender with a clear coat finish. I traveled from Albany, Oregon to Monterey, California assuming the car would in some kind of shop. Boy was I wrong! My shop was the 3rd level of a 4 level parking garage and my lighting was some sporadically placed 8' florescent tube lights.
Needless to say, not what you would call optimum conditions to sand down a 20+ foot car with case-hardened paint. LOL
I think these were all taken in 2000, if you look at the wheel cover you can see the Titanic going down. Terry Cook has a great sense of humor.
I started at 5:00pm in the evening and worked non-stop through the night and finished at noon the next day. It was truly a Go or No-Go decision and I decided to just do it.
Immediately after I finished wiping off a coat of M16 Professional Paste Wax the car was moved into the middle of a car show as one of the featured attractions in full-on summer SoCal sun. No DA Polisher, all the buffing was done using only a Makita Rotary buffer and the most aggressive products I had with me were M84 and M85.
When it came to doing the sanding and buffing, the work was done as much by instinct as it was by vision as it was hard to see what was going on at the surface level. We didn't have the Brinkman back then either.
The paint was so hard that I broke my leg from pushing so hard on my trusty, dusty Makita against the sides of the car and the next day out of fear it was going to come apart while I was walking around I somehow got a hose clamp and put it on my leg and tightened it down as tight as I could get it without stripping it out. It's still there today.
Later on that day I waxed Scrape with M98 Medallion Premium Paint Care and applied M40 to the tires of Chip Foose's 0032 a 1932 Ford Roadster and hung out at the car show with Chip and Christopher Titus until the R&M auction where Scrape sold for $250.000.00, The Titanic sold for I forget how much and I think Chip's car went for $125,000.00
Afterwards we all went out to dinner and Terry picked up the entire bill. While I was in Monterey, Terry let me drive the Titanic around instead of getting a rental car, suffice to say it was a pretty fun weekend for a small town detailer from a Podunk town in Oregon. Barry Meguiar's invited me to the Cars & Cigars party where again, Scrape and the Titanic were on display and that may have been the first time I met Mike Pennington in person, at least I think... I was at the "Train the Trainer's" meeting in Newport Beach in 1988 and don't remember meeting him at that meeting but I did sit and have a great talk with Malcolm Meguiar, the head chemist for Meguiar's for over 70 years.
So while lighting is very important, sometimes you just have to use what you have and as Larry the Cable Guy would say...
"Git-R-Done"
— Larry the Cable Guy
Wonder where the Titanic is today?
I know Scrape is in the basement of the Peterson Museum as I was given a tour of the hidden treasure in the basement of the Peterson Museum a few years ago. They also had a car that Elvis Presley drove in Blue Hawaii, looked like this one.
