Cirallyc Black 2000 W202 C240 full paint correction Alright, it’s been quite a while since I do these write ups,. Lots of things have happened in my professional life since the beginning of the year, to be honest, there were months where I did not get any chance to do any detailing due to new commitments and responsibilities in other aspects of my life. Before I start I would like to personally apologize to my some individuals for not having been keeping in touch for these past few months, especially to my friend Jimmy and also Ken (911fanatic). Well long story short, I got the chance to resume detailing since a couple of months back, and I’m going to start posting my experiences starting with this car. This merc belongs to the same brothers to whom the black Toyota Minivan in my other post belongs to. It’s a 2000 w202 C240, with tuned, ported and polished v6 engine, equipped with a Dastek piggyback engine management system and also a tuned exhaust courtesy of Remus (same company as Sebring in the US). It also has uprated brakes from C43 AMG on all four corners and the wheels are BBS RFs shod in Yokohamas sized 18x10.5 at the front and 18x11.5 at the rears. 2 months earlier the car was repainted in so called Spies Hecker cyrallic black, these paint jobs are supposed to look black in the shades with big gold flakes showing up only when the paint is hit by a light source. Sounds cool eh? Not so fast.. this car has got to have THE SOFTEST paint I’ve ever worked on. I don’t know whats wrong in the paint application process as im not a paint expert, but I can tell you that simply wiping off polish residue with a quality MF wil introduce swirls and marrings to the paint. Any touches on the paint, no matter dry or assisted with lubrication such as qd, or final inspection risks marring the paint. So the owner contacted me and said that he wanted all those ugly swirls out of his paint, and cost as well as time was not an issue. I said yes to the plea, and drove 200 miles to his house. After the car was washed with a stong dishwashing soap solution, followed with ONR and then clayed and put under the lights, lots of swirls, and rds were evident. I then taped the whole car and taped an area on the passenger side rear door as my test panel. After a few tries I immediately realized that this was not going to be just another detail, simply attacking the paint with my normal methods just wont cut it. I had to experiment and find a method that would work on this ultra finicky paint job. To my astonishment it wasn’t m205 that was going to help me get the job done, nor the ultra fine s40. Its actually the rather dry s17 that allows me to get the defects out and finish the paint lsp ready without introducing any more marring to the paint. Confused? Let me explain my method (this was found after like three hours of trying): 1. Compounding/defect removal : I removed the swirls and RDS (and also a few oxidation marks) by s17 on uber yellow pads on low RPM around 1000-1300-1000 with medium to low pressure as im reaching the end of each “hit” and medium arm speed , paying close attention to the heat generated. I would repeat this step as many times as safely possible while keeping my working area compact (not more than 2 feet x 2 feet) , until all defects are removed. Some panels took me up to 5 or 6 hits to get the deeper rds out, while on average I repeated this process (or “hits” as I like to call it) three to four times on a section at a time. 2. Refining: This is where it gets interesting, the previous compounding stage left a little hollograming (much less than I expected, I could even argue that it was just about lsp ready provided im not plagued with OCD , credits to uber yellow and Scholl’s S17). My initial expectation was to refine the paint at this stage with either s40 on LC white pads or m205 on whites/greens. But what I found on this particular merc is that those two methods left too much of an oily residue, that it took too much wiping to get those residue out of the paint, and as a consequence , this excessive wiping introduced more marrings to the paint. Now if I wanted to take the easy way out, I could’ve just applied some Poorboy’s Black hole, before I apply the lsp to hide these marrings out. But, that wont satisfy me, this friend of mine asked for a full paint correction, and I should give him no less than that. So after some more trials (at this point, the time was like 1 a.m.) I found out that the combo I needed to clean up the leftovers from the compounding stage and further improve the gloss of the paint is Scholl’s s17 on LC black finishing pad. The characteristic of s17 where it would seem to “dissapear” into the paint after being worked down properly really played to my advantage on this extremely soft paint job. Because there were so little residue left on the paint, there were next to no residue left to wipe! This left me with an optically perfect paint and reduced the chances of me introducing new marrings on the paint (although I still waited for each section to cool down first before wiping them). As for LSP, I applied a very thin coat of Black Fire Wet Diamond sealant on top of the prepped paint. BFWD is so easy to wipe off, which makes it perfect for this paint and it makes the paint extremely slippery. Here are some 50-50 shots of my test panel (right/near side untouched) This is me cleaning up the paint using s17 on lc black finishing pads 50-50 shot of the test panel, I think you have to zoom this one to really see the difference This is a picture of me working on the passenger side door (did I tell you it was past 1 am?) Here are some pics taken about 20 hours later, after I was done correction the exterior of the car, including applying a coat of BFWD. On thing about this amazing sealant is that it doesn’t really like humidity, if you apply it under high humidity, you will see hazing happening all over the car in a few minutes. My tip is, leave them hazes until the next day, put the car under the sun, and the next evening, wipe all of the moisture off the car, things should be okay the day after. On this soft paint, I used a mixture of ONR diluted to qd mix and a good set of MFs. The bonnet Check out the swirls on the following pic, they are not on the paint but those are the swirls on the polycarbonate roof. Some finished pics, It was quite late so sorry for the lack of good lighting You can see the moisture that I was talking about quite clearly on the following pics. Again please excuse our shaky hands due to our improvised light source. (Thanks goes out to my mate IYO, who is also a registered DB member, for helping me with these following shots, my muscles were just too tired to have any chance at holding the camera steadily under the low-light condition) See them around the light? Those are dew not surface defects, it was so humid that day Shaky hands, camera trying hard to work under the low light condition Take a look at the wings/fenders Trying hard to get a whole-car reflection shot Some more (struggling) reflection shots Some more reflection shots I managed to take the morning after Total working time was around 25 hours. Thank you for viewing. Cheers from Indonesia, Bob aka BSTP, BobbySiTukangPoles or Bobby the polish guy in English
they're BBS RF wheels with custom lip, 18x10.5 fronts and 18x 11.5 rears if im not mistaken. the fenders had to be modified slightly to accomodate them
