Hey guys! My mother-in-law recently moved down to FL from IL to help out with the baby and what not. If you didn't know, my wife and I had a little girl 6 months ago, and her mom has been a huge help. To show her how thankful we are, my friend (Eric) and I did a full out detail of her car this past weekend. The victim - a 2010 Nissan Sentra with 118k on the clock. I warn you now, there are a TON of pictures! Keep in mind this car spent it's entire life in IL driving around 150 miles a day in the blistering heat of summer and sub-freezing temps of winter. Then after a 1100 mile drive to FL, this is what we end up with: Nice and dirty: Someone got a little too close to the drive through window: Here are a few before shots of the beautiful interior lol: So I don't have a whole bunch of "during" shots except for this one: I did not capture any after pictures of the interior, but the process consisted of scrubbing all of the interior surfaces with Zep Citrus diluted, cleaning the glass with Stoner's Invisible Glass and scrubbing the seats with Scotchguard Interior Cleaner. Eric soaked the floor mats in a detergent solution, scrubbed them out and then rinsed them off with the pressure washer. After this process...they looked like new. Finally, the interior got a thorough vacuuming. On to the wash process. After the interior was done, we pulled it out and Eric tackled the wheels while I took care of the body. The car got soaked with a Dawn/Zep Citrus wash through the foam gun: Nice night to clean a car eh? After that, we brough it in to blow dry and clay. We also jacked it up and pulled the wheels: Here is Eric hard at work getting those barrels cleaned up: Comparison of clean versus dirty: Here's a quick 50/50 after testing out SIP and an orange pad: While Eric was tending to the wheels, I polished the car out via a Dewalt rotary using an orange CCS pad with Menzerna SIP followed up with a blue CCS pad and 3M UF. After all polishing was done, the car got a second wash with Dawn/Zep Citrus to remove the polishing oils. The wheels got sealed with Collinite 845, tires were dressed with Opti-Bond, glass was topped with Rain-X and the paint got a good coat of Rubbish Boys OE. Here are few shots of the whole car after everything was completed. 100% correction was not achieved, but we weren't going for 100% either. You'll notice a few spots that look like holograms...but it's not; it's just the wax sweating and needing a final buff. Here are a few sun shots: Sorry for the smudge in this photo...the wax sweated just a bit, but I wiped it off after: I pulled it back in to the garage and got a few reflection shots as well: Overall, I think this car had a HUGE turnaround. Like I said...we weren't going for 100% correction, but there was a definite improvement to the gloss and clarity of the paint. Now that it's in FL full time, I'll be able to maintain properly and keep it looking good. I also want to give a big shoutout to Eric for assisting with this detail...definitely couldn't have done it without his help. Thanks for looking guys!! As always, questions or comments are welcomed!
that is a huge turnaround. it sure doesnt look like a 117k mile car. Were you able to fix the scuffs on the interior door? My ladies' accord has them pretty bad and im not sure how to tackle them
Excellent work, looks like you take a lot of pride in cleaning and maintaining your mother in laws car! Yea the scuffs on the cheaper plastic doors are so difficult to remove!?!? What did you soak those floor mats in?
The scuffs weren't able to come out unfortunately. But even just cleaning them and getting all the dirt out of the crevices made a big different. The floor mats were pressure washed first to get as much loose debris out as possible. Then they were soaked in basic laundry detergent and agitated with a brush. After that, we brought them outside, pressure washed them again and then spot cleaned them with the Scotch Guard. Here are a couple pictures of them:
Thank you!! It was a lot of fun working on it. Next up is their other daughter's Sentra lol. We all drive Nissans.
Nice job!! Looks great!! One note to make it would make it more pleasant to view if you had spaced out the pictures.
Weird...I copied it from another forum, so the formatting must have gotten messed up. Should be fixed now.
