okay..yeah..toyotas are pretty common and easy to find details...
a few other thoughts before you start..i was in your place last spring..
hand detailed since i started driving and then jumped into DA world with the dizzying array of products and process...
ocd about clearcoat removal...buy a ptg...theres a $110 option on ebay that works good..it helps with nerves and tells you a lot about your paint...
decon aka decontamination steps...
iron x
the rubdown...clay or nanskin
imo decon gives you 50%of the clarity..varies based on paint condition.
btw..my comment about overthinking wasnt saying it was a waste of time...its good to know what you are using..we all overthink diy projects..else we would be forum members...lol
i probably read the same post you did an spent another few hrs readingup on it...
but then theres so much else to crash course to prep for a full detail.
what r u thinking for lsp...sealant?
i use wg dgps and then top with ps21 bc ive been a carnuba wax guy since i started hand detailing my cars in my teens
Hi
Yes its a dizzy array of products and Philosophies!
I am a great beleiver in the paint thickness guage.
Being on my 12th Mercedes I always write over there contract that I wont accept a repaired car! (Boy they dont like that! ... but over time I learnt if you stand there about to smash £100K .... they will do it.
And on acceptance inspection, I insist they are clean polished and dry. And run a microfibre over most of the panels to see if there is any drag. And yep I ask them to spot check say 8 places with their PTG.
My friend thought I was a trully sad OCD idiot. Until he found his S Class picked up a ton of stone chips, mine of a similar age, had one! Turns out his front end was repaired before he picked it up, and they accused him of having it repainted! Why because the paint was 210 microns! Way over their max permitted thickness for the 30 year Mobilo bodywork guarantee!
So to do this job I bought one ERAY meter £106 ... OK its probably rubbish .. but shows a consistency over my car where say on a certain part of the panel on both sides its 10 microns thinner than the average max.. I guess the sweep of the robot, didnt handle that part of the curve so well. Well I put it down to that as it was in an identical part on both opposing wings ... pretty hard to recreate by hand, and had it been resprayed woukd no doubt be thicker than MBs std. max thickness.
Its not ideal as it wont read plastic, and all the bumbers, skirts etc. are plastic, and to my dismay I discovered my Boot was plastic! But it does read steel and aluminium which is what 80% of the car is.
Says its accurate to 3 microns. And factory calibrated is within 1 micron of both the steel and the Alu shim they provide for recalibrating.
The good ones the MB body shop has measures individual paint layers so you can see the clear coat thickness and measures on plastic ... but they seem to be from £800 to £4000 so way outside my “worthwhile for the money” budget.
Hopefully it will at least ensure I dint take too much off! And at least I know those two thinner areas to go carefully .. maybe sacrifice finish for thickness.
I am going to finish it with a double coating of Collinite 476S ... that beads well for 6 months.
I know there are some super Ceramic finishes but then I think it also depends how good the guy who lays it on is? One friends looks ace and another looks to me to be a shiny mess!
Not offended by the “Overthinking moniker”. I was blasted on one forum for I guess being to fastidious in my research. Basically it was about chnaging the ABC suspension oil filter ... on later cars like mine Mb UK wont even sell you a filter! My overthinking discovered the reason was if you even open the filter top, it unscrews the seal ... and all the crap from the day the car was built, drops straight into the pump feed and gets blasted at 200 Bar around the entire system! ( pretty much prematurely destroying about £18Ks of controllers, suspension arms and the pump!). I eventually found a custom tool that one can capture the old oil and at the same time flush through new oil .. and then change the filter ( ironicslly its the same filter but upgraded to a finer mu as used in the older systems ).
So in my book unless you have had a good prefessional training in these black arts ... its always worth treble checking everything before “fiddling” LOL.