Greg Nichols graciously invited me to help out on this car. Most of the pictures here I, um, "borrowed" from him. Hope he doesn't mind. The car is a 2005 Bentley GT Continental. As you can see in the before shots, it was heavily swirled. This isn't surprising, as this car has *the very softest* paint either of us have ever worked on before. The paint itself is beautiful; there is absolutely zero orange peel to be found. However, it is so very soft that most MF's will mar it. Only my Eurow towels could touch this buttery paint without inducing some marring. After we were done with the correction and polishing steps, we took it outside for a very strong CW&G wash to remove all the polishing oils to check for hiding defects and holos. The wash itself caused so many swirls we had to redo the entire car with Ultrafina and red pads. Oy. We could actually see the WW drying towel patterns in the paint! Seriously, guys, this paint was *SOFT*! After trying innumerable combinations of polishes and pads, the final process consisted of correcting with M105 and M95, then going straight to Ultrafina on red wave foam finishing pads. We did at least three full applications of UF/red, and in some places four. The paint was so soft that UF had no problems cleaning up after 105 and 95. One really interesting bit of discovery: M105 on a PFW pad finished down better on this car than M105 and an LC white foam. In fact, we were able to get brand new PFW pads to finish down completely holo free with M105 for three panels. After that, it didn't matter how much we spurred/cleaned the PFW's, they would leave bad holos. Even with the holos, though, the PFW finished down better than even the softest foam with M105. I've always had great luck getting PFW to finish down well. It was nice to see it work so well on paint this soft. Anyway, enough of my ramblings.. on to the pics! Befores: DURING: Supe glaring the paint into submission... Check out all the holos! This was after correcting with 105, and prior to the UF. AFTERS: We didn't have alot of sun left, but we tried... The tires/wheels were not done at the owner's request. He had a brand new set of rubber and wheels he was going to put on after we were done with the detail. Gratuitous reflection shot of my 'bee in the background. Good shot, Greg!
Thanks guys. Forgot to mention...The rainbow effect around the sun in some of the after shots was due to a fingerprint on the lens of my phone camera. I forgot to bring my "good" camera, so my afters were taken with a very dirty lens on my Blackberry.
The tires are not dressed because he was going to put on the new Avanti wheels. We could have used a less agressive method of correction but the deep scratches would not come out unless we did agressive. This paint really tested our abilities. Also, after we fixed the washing marring (3 man hours) we took it outside to check for halograms and none were found..........just then a huge microburst of wind covered the car in dust!!!!! So 3 more man hours later we polished out the marring from that.
Gorgeous vehicle :druling: :druling: Interesting to hear how soft they are :thumb: Thank you for sharing, the end results are very nice :cheerl:
imagine the owners reaction if they stopped by after you did 105 and b4 UF, they llikely would have freak'ed :yikes:
He did. And he did. He's a really cool guy, though. He checked up on us several times throughout the day. He also brought us a couple MF's to look at that he had picked up at SEMA last year. The feel of them is very similar to the Eurows, but the nap isn't quite as thick. Definitely some of the nicest MF's I've seen. Now if we can just figure out where to buy them from...
Yeah, so overall we did the initial correction/polish, then another polish after the wash, then another polish after the dust storm. We ended up using about half a quart of UF on this car. We were both really excited about how well UF and red finishing foam finished down on this soft paint. We *hope* that it's completely holo-free. It sure looked like it was, but we all know how polishes can unintentionally hide defects and holos. Ah well, if the holos return, it just gives us a reason to work on this car again...Maybe I should change my phone number....
Really great job on this one, that must have been one tedious day with all that re-polishing. I have a customer who just got one in navy and now after this thread im going to be affraid if he asks me to work on it!
Nice save on the paint. Wierd that it was so soft. I have a client who has gone through three Bentleys in the last 3 years, his current driver being a GTC and I have yet to see a swirl in any of the paint jobs.
It could be that only Bentley's black is that soft. That's how it is with BMW's, too; their black paint is about as soft as this Bentleys was, yet the rest of their colors aren't too soft.
