tuscarora dave
Active member
- Aug 21, 2009
- 5,403
- 0
Hi everyone.
A few months back, my father was chatting with an old friend of mine at the bar. My old friend "Pete" asked Dad how I was doing and Dad began telling him about the cars that I detail. Dad is very impressed with some of the turnarounds that I do with the paint corrections and he tells people about it any chance he gets, God Bless him.
So Pete tells Dad to have me give him a call, that he has something he wants me to look at. So when I called him last week he said he'd be right down and that "Yeah I got something for you to look at". He shows up in this 1989 bright red Honda Accord and begins to tell me the story behind what happened to the paint.
Pete lives out in the country and his neighbor had these "Fainting Goats", 5 fainting goats to be exact. Anyway, Pete went out of town on a trip and while he was gone apparently the 5 goats somehow got out of their pen and traveled over to Pete's property and for some reason they took a liking to his daily driver (the red Accord). I have never seen fainting goats in person but Pete describes them as being about half the size of a Billy Goat but definitely larger than a Pigmy Goat and goes on to tell me that goats like to climb up on things. If my memory serves me right, I seem to remember seeing a goat standing on top of a dog house at some point of my life and I think we have all seen the mountain goats climbing the rocky side of a mountain on the wildlife channel or National Geographic channel. I guess goats are natural climbers.
Moving forward, Pete arrives back home after his trip and drives up the driveway to find all 5 of these goats standing on his Honda Accord. It seems they either had a tough time getting up onto the car or perhaps they had climbed up onto it several times while he was gone. Every panel had these long hoof scrapes on them and the hood, the roof and the trunk lid were all littered with scrapes and scratches from the goats dancing around up there.
My first thought was that being Honda paint is pretty soft it shouldn't be too tough to clean this mess up but I did tell Pete that some of the scratches would be too deep to completely remove without removing too much clear. Well this is no OEM paint. The car was repainted at some point and the paint was super hard. I guess that is a good thing in the sense that the hoof marks didn't completely destroy soft Honda paint. The bad part was that it took a lot of buffing to get the results I was after.
Here are a few photos of the damage before I started the paint correction.
I didn't really have a lot of time for photography and the natural day light wasn't doing a lot to show the actual condition of the paint beyond the hoof marks. Being an older daily driver, the paint was in overall rough shape. Here are a few photos under the lights in the shop.
At the beginning of this job I only had a small amount of M-105 in the bottom of a quart bottle so I decided to go with Mothers Rubbing Compound from their professional line. With foam pads on the rotary, the Mothers wasn't really doing much to correct the super hard paint so I broke out the wool pads and had at it. The wool pads were leaving behind their own mess so I followed that step with orange foam 5.5" VC pads from Poorboy's World on my new Flex PE-14 rotary. Before I got the hood rotary compounded with the orange foam and Mothers Rubbing Compound, the Flex PE-14 was so hot that I feared that it would melt down if I continued with it so I broke out the Makita rotary to finish the roof and trunk lid. After the orange foam passes, I finished with M-205 on the Flex 3401.
By now it was time to shut things down and get home to bed. I told Pete that it would take me 2 evenings to finish it up. While at my day job the next day, I kept thinking about how long it was taking to get the results using the Mothers Compound and decided that after work I would drive over to Harrisburg and pick up a quart of M-105 at the Advance Auto Parts, so I did. When I got back to the car, I tried out a few different pads with the M-105 and found that the Purple Foamed Wool pad was the magic bullet for this hard as nails paint. It worked so well and so fast that I decided to go over the hood, the roof and the trunk lid again with it as I wasn't completely satisfied that the Mothers had done all that should have been done to correct the paint.
The lesson learned here is that if I am running out of M-105, it will be much quicker to just shut down the shop and drive out to get more than to try something else instead. This lesson I have had several times before but I seemed to have not fully learned that.
So here is what I did to the car.
1. Pre-soak the car with a citrus degreaser then wash the car.
2. Clay the paint with Clay Magic Red (medium grade) clay - ONR for lube.
3. Tape off rubber and plastic molding and tape off vulnerable sharp edges.
4. Rotary compound hood, roof and trunk lid using 6" Edge 2000 double sided black wool pad with Mothers Professional Rubbing Compound at around 1800-2000 RPM.
5. Rotary compound hood, roof and trunk lid using 5.5" Poorboy's orange VC light cutting pad with Mothers Professional Rubbing compound at 1200 RPM.
6. Finish polish hood, roof and trunk lid using Flex 3401 with red 5.5" PB VC pad and M-205.
This concludes day one of this job.
Day 2
1. Test several pads with M-105 and rotary, decide on the 6" Purple Foamed Wool pad.
2. Compound the entire car (including hood, roof and trunk lid) with rotary and 6" PFW pad using M-105 at 2000 RPM . (used orange Cyclo pads for pillars and bumpers)
3. Remove tape from entire car.
4.Finish polish entire car with M-205 using Flex 3401 with red Poorboy's 5.5" VC finishing pad. Speed setting 6 with a very slow arm speed and 3 section passes on every panel (I used green Cyclo pads for pillars and bumpers).
5. Pre-soak with citrus degreaser and power wash entire car.
6. Using a 100% horse hair parts cleaning brush and full strength citrus degreaser, brush all rubber, plastic and glass parts of car including tires, wheels and wells.
7. Dry car and apply UTTG to all rubber and plastic parts (excluding tires and wells)
8. Apply silicone/water based tire shine to tires and wells.
9. Apply UPGP to all painted areas.
10. Clean exterior glass.
11. Final wipedown and call Pete to come pick up his new car.
Here are the after photos.
At some point during this job, it had become a personal challenge to safely produce the best results that I possibly could and the amount of work exceeded the amount of pay that Pete and I agreed upon. I thought of how unusual the scenario of goats walking on the car was and how many people surely had seen the car and heard the story of the goats parading all over Pete's car. In this, I see marketing opportunity which is potentially worth much more than the money I charged for the job. Pete knew I really put some heart and extra effort into this job and he offered me extra money. I said no to the extra money and told him of the potential marketing opportunity that I see in this job and asked him to hand out a stack of my cards to the folks that had seen the damage on the car before the paint correction, when they see how it looks now. He agreed. We are all happy and his girlfriend placed her car on my schedule for a full detail as soon as she saw the results that were achieved on Pete's car.
Thanks for looking, TD
A few months back, my father was chatting with an old friend of mine at the bar. My old friend "Pete" asked Dad how I was doing and Dad began telling him about the cars that I detail. Dad is very impressed with some of the turnarounds that I do with the paint corrections and he tells people about it any chance he gets, God Bless him.
So Pete tells Dad to have me give him a call, that he has something he wants me to look at. So when I called him last week he said he'd be right down and that "Yeah I got something for you to look at". He shows up in this 1989 bright red Honda Accord and begins to tell me the story behind what happened to the paint.
Pete lives out in the country and his neighbor had these "Fainting Goats", 5 fainting goats to be exact. Anyway, Pete went out of town on a trip and while he was gone apparently the 5 goats somehow got out of their pen and traveled over to Pete's property and for some reason they took a liking to his daily driver (the red Accord). I have never seen fainting goats in person but Pete describes them as being about half the size of a Billy Goat but definitely larger than a Pigmy Goat and goes on to tell me that goats like to climb up on things. If my memory serves me right, I seem to remember seeing a goat standing on top of a dog house at some point of my life and I think we have all seen the mountain goats climbing the rocky side of a mountain on the wildlife channel or National Geographic channel. I guess goats are natural climbers.
Moving forward, Pete arrives back home after his trip and drives up the driveway to find all 5 of these goats standing on his Honda Accord. It seems they either had a tough time getting up onto the car or perhaps they had climbed up onto it several times while he was gone. Every panel had these long hoof scrapes on them and the hood, the roof and the trunk lid were all littered with scrapes and scratches from the goats dancing around up there.
My first thought was that being Honda paint is pretty soft it shouldn't be too tough to clean this mess up but I did tell Pete that some of the scratches would be too deep to completely remove without removing too much clear. Well this is no OEM paint. The car was repainted at some point and the paint was super hard. I guess that is a good thing in the sense that the hoof marks didn't completely destroy soft Honda paint. The bad part was that it took a lot of buffing to get the results I was after.
Here are a few photos of the damage before I started the paint correction.
I didn't really have a lot of time for photography and the natural day light wasn't doing a lot to show the actual condition of the paint beyond the hoof marks. Being an older daily driver, the paint was in overall rough shape. Here are a few photos under the lights in the shop.
At the beginning of this job I only had a small amount of M-105 in the bottom of a quart bottle so I decided to go with Mothers Rubbing Compound from their professional line. With foam pads on the rotary, the Mothers wasn't really doing much to correct the super hard paint so I broke out the wool pads and had at it. The wool pads were leaving behind their own mess so I followed that step with orange foam 5.5" VC pads from Poorboy's World on my new Flex PE-14 rotary. Before I got the hood rotary compounded with the orange foam and Mothers Rubbing Compound, the Flex PE-14 was so hot that I feared that it would melt down if I continued with it so I broke out the Makita rotary to finish the roof and trunk lid. After the orange foam passes, I finished with M-205 on the Flex 3401.
By now it was time to shut things down and get home to bed. I told Pete that it would take me 2 evenings to finish it up. While at my day job the next day, I kept thinking about how long it was taking to get the results using the Mothers Compound and decided that after work I would drive over to Harrisburg and pick up a quart of M-105 at the Advance Auto Parts, so I did. When I got back to the car, I tried out a few different pads with the M-105 and found that the Purple Foamed Wool pad was the magic bullet for this hard as nails paint. It worked so well and so fast that I decided to go over the hood, the roof and the trunk lid again with it as I wasn't completely satisfied that the Mothers had done all that should have been done to correct the paint.
The lesson learned here is that if I am running out of M-105, it will be much quicker to just shut down the shop and drive out to get more than to try something else instead. This lesson I have had several times before but I seemed to have not fully learned that.
So here is what I did to the car.
1. Pre-soak the car with a citrus degreaser then wash the car.
2. Clay the paint with Clay Magic Red (medium grade) clay - ONR for lube.
3. Tape off rubber and plastic molding and tape off vulnerable sharp edges.
4. Rotary compound hood, roof and trunk lid using 6" Edge 2000 double sided black wool pad with Mothers Professional Rubbing Compound at around 1800-2000 RPM.
5. Rotary compound hood, roof and trunk lid using 5.5" Poorboy's orange VC light cutting pad with Mothers Professional Rubbing compound at 1200 RPM.
6. Finish polish hood, roof and trunk lid using Flex 3401 with red 5.5" PB VC pad and M-205.
This concludes day one of this job.
Day 2
1. Test several pads with M-105 and rotary, decide on the 6" Purple Foamed Wool pad.
2. Compound the entire car (including hood, roof and trunk lid) with rotary and 6" PFW pad using M-105 at 2000 RPM . (used orange Cyclo pads for pillars and bumpers)
3. Remove tape from entire car.
4.Finish polish entire car with M-205 using Flex 3401 with red Poorboy's 5.5" VC finishing pad. Speed setting 6 with a very slow arm speed and 3 section passes on every panel (I used green Cyclo pads for pillars and bumpers).
5. Pre-soak with citrus degreaser and power wash entire car.
6. Using a 100% horse hair parts cleaning brush and full strength citrus degreaser, brush all rubber, plastic and glass parts of car including tires, wheels and wells.
7. Dry car and apply UTTG to all rubber and plastic parts (excluding tires and wells)
8. Apply silicone/water based tire shine to tires and wells.
9. Apply UPGP to all painted areas.
10. Clean exterior glass.
11. Final wipedown and call Pete to come pick up his new car.
Here are the after photos.
At some point during this job, it had become a personal challenge to safely produce the best results that I possibly could and the amount of work exceeded the amount of pay that Pete and I agreed upon. I thought of how unusual the scenario of goats walking on the car was and how many people surely had seen the car and heard the story of the goats parading all over Pete's car. In this, I see marketing opportunity which is potentially worth much more than the money I charged for the job. Pete knew I really put some heart and extra effort into this job and he offered me extra money. I said no to the extra money and told him of the potential marketing opportunity that I see in this job and asked him to hand out a stack of my cards to the folks that had seen the damage on the car before the paint correction, when they see how it looks now. He agreed. We are all happy and his girlfriend placed her car on my schedule for a full detail as soon as she saw the results that were achieved on Pete's car.
Thanks for looking, TD
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