W202 C230 Kompressor in Smarag Black with whole car over spray plus mini review on D300+mf DA compounding system and m205+foam pads on rotary I actually did a two step paint correction on this car earlier this year , in January, it was sealed with two coats of IW845 at the time. Since then the owner has been using the car as a daily driver , took it to car washes at least twice a week , and no maintenance job had been done to the car since. I saw this car regularly in C class club meetings and thru the months I can see the gradual build up of swirls since the owner had failed to heed my advice on using 2BM exclusively. Anyway, a few weeks ago the owner called me , around midnight, and when I picked up the phone there was clearly a worried voice at the other end of the line. He told me that he just had the fence of his house repainted the other day and now the whole car is covered in something that looks like a thick white layer of dust, and he asked me if there’s anything I can do to bring the car back to its initial condition. So I told him to bring the car in so I can do a proper inspection on it. Sure enough when I got the car, from a far the car doesn’t look like it had a coat of over spray in it. What I noticed was the car seemed to have bigger and brighter metallic flakes on the paint. As I looked closer though, the extent of the problem became evident, the things that I thought were metallic flakes were actually a coat of paint overspray that covered the whole car. They were on top of everything from the paint to the glasses even the plastic pillars and badges. As I’ve said before, it looked like a thick layer of bright white dust covering the whole car thoroughly. I then sit down with the owner to discuss the course of action over a cup of coffee. I honestly told him that this kinda problem can only be sorted out if he let me work on the car to the best of my ability. Basically I was looking at at least a three day’s work or posibly more (it took me 4 days in the end to sort the car out). The owner said yes, and I promised him that the car would look better than it did the last time I worked on the car , because this time I’m not constrained to finish correcting the car in only two days. My first plan of attack after washing the car and the wheels with a stripping ratio of megs shampoo and dishwashing soap was to apply multiple sets of megs body solvent with ample dwelling time in between applications in hope to soften that the overspray particles had with the car’s clear. In total I applied megs body solvent 4 times with more than 30 minutes dwelling time for each application. I would work on cleaning each wheel and wheel wells as I waited for each application to dwell, using megs body solvent, megs apc and an some wheel brushes. I would also wash the car again after every body solvet application while scrubbing it with a bug sponge. Normally this would help me in removing the tough tar stains on a car’s paint. But this time, the over spray layer just wont budge. After 4 repeated applications of body solvet I proceed in attempting to clay the car. I made a test spot on the bonnet and it turned out that it took a very long time, with a lot of effort for the clay to remove the overspray. But the good news it, it did remove it. I tested the same approach on a small area of the trunk lid, and again, it managed to remove the overspray after a long and forceful claying. It was clear to me that the overspray would be able to be removed completely, but claying would not be the wisest way to achieve complete removal. I then did paint thickness measurements around the car’s panels, and the paint was healthy and it also indicated that the whole car was still wearing its original coat of paint. So I tried my next approach, PO85RD on Uber green with the rotary, no luck, then I tried s17 on Uber yellow pad and the Dewalt rotary. I tried various pressures and rpm ranges with this combo to no avail. It failed to do anything to the overspray. The night before , I just got my d300 and a couple of 5.5 in mf pads order delivered along with the appropriate LC backing plate. I have to inform you that I was not an experience DA user, having only acquired a Das6pro unit a couple of weeks earlier to be used on the Duragloss beta sealant testing. I have to admit that , apart from all the rave I’ve read about Meguiar’s DA MF Correction System, I was then rather sceptical about its abilities to do anything to this oversprayed and swirly Mercedes paint. But at the time , I figured, since I had the product, I might as well try it before “moving on” to what at the time was perceivably “more-aggressive” methods to me, namely, wool compounding on the rotary and then if that still won’t cut it, wetsanding the paint. I have spend the whole week before reading articles related to the application of the Megs microfibre correction compounding system, and at the time I was aware of the Kevin Brown method. Nevertheless, before I started , I made sure to re read all of the articles I’ve bookmarked as I took a break after the previous 5 hours of attempted decontamination stage that failed to do much to the paint. After the break I taped up a section on the trunk lid to serve as my test section with the d300+mf cutting disc on my DA. I tried to follow all instructions that I got from all those forum posts on how to get the most of the system. I made a mental note to be prepared to clean the pad after every section pass (or sets) , repared a spray bottle of distilled water to try the supplemental wetting agent method, primed the pad throughly and appliying a restricted amount of product on the primed pad. I started to work the product with very very slow arm movement (to the point where I thought that I was moving it too slow) and very high and even pressure on the pad (enough to slow the pad to rotate only around 3 times a second), in a criss-cross pattern. I found that with very slow arm movement the product dried after only about 2 or 3 passes, so I tried to spray distilled water on the section and that gave me another 2 passes before it dried up again, when that happens I applied another spray of distilled water and go over the section again. To my amazement, this processed succeeded in not only removing the all of the overspray that were on the section but also removing most of the swirls. Seeing this desirable outcome , I decided to reapply the product (2 small drops on the pad) and repeat the routine. The second application left me with a near perfect surface almost free of any swirls and a very refined reflection. To quench my quriosity repeated the routine again on the same section and the paint came out very close to perfect , there were barely any swirls left on it. I then took my rotary, snap an uber green pad and proceed to refine the paint with m205. The results was (for me) very satisfactory. Not only that (as I’ve said before) the overspray and most of the surface defects were removed, but I was also left with crisps and deep reflections on the paint that I thought I had never seen on this car before. Unfortunately because at the time I was so worried about the amount of time it would take me to finish the car, considering the decontamination process alone had eaten close to 6 hours of my first day on the car, I didn’t get to take many pics on the correction process. Nevertheless here are a few I managed to take with my phone after the first set of d300, showing a 50-50 of the trunk lid. Here are a few 50-50 shot I managed to take on the hood, these are after d300+mf on speed 4.5 with the DA, before refining with 205 on the rotary Under ambient light The whole hood after being refined with 205 on uber green and the DeWalt rotary. A little closer with the help of the Fenix This was also my first time using m205 , and I must admit I REALLY like this product. Actually I’m liking the SMAT products more and more now for their relatively more flexible performance, I used to use Scholl and more recently, Menzerna products. I applied 205 hard on my first couple of passes, at around 1500 RPM , moderate arm movement and firm pressure , then I reduce my pressure while keeping the RPM for another couple of passes and then I reduced the RPM and lighten my pressure even more for a few last passes. In total, a section , like a third of the front fender will take me around 3.5 minutes to correct and refine, in the past , for finishing I used to spend around the 8 minute mark with finishing polishes such as Scholl’s S40 or Menz’s PO85RD. So 205 is a HUGE time saver. To be honest, I don’t see any difference, at least on this type of paint in the results of 205 over PO85RD. maybe its just this car, or maybe the d300 did such a stellar job, I can’t be sure at the moment as this was my first time with both products. In total the d300 compounding and further refining with 205 took me 2.5 days to complete on the whole car. The last day was used to clean up the hard to reach areas, dressing the rubbers and plastics, and sealing the paint with Collinite 915. So in total I spent 4 days on this car. With the amount of time spent doing the compounding and then refining to get the paint to this level, I don’t see the d300 system as a time saver. Yes, its true that it only took me 2 “steps” to complete the car as opposed to 3 if I was to go with my normal rotary routine (i.e. wool+m95 then s17+ubergreen then po85rd/205+uber blue), but the time taken was roughly the same. Maybe it’s the hard paint or maybe my technique was still not optimum with the d300, but right now I don’t see it as a time saver. But I do see the DAMF correction system as a novel , cleaner and safer method to do heavy compounding, also, arguably, it looks like the d300+mf pad compounding did something to the paint that resulted in improving the level of clarity of the final finish after it was refined that I think I might have never achieved before, maybe it’s just my eyes playing tricks on me, but, that’s how I see it. In a nutshell here are the steps I took to correct this paint - 3-4 sets of d300 + mf cutting pad on Das6Pro DA at speed 4.5 with very very slow arm movements and very firm pressure. Sometimes water was sprayed between each re-application to get more cut from the available product still on the pad. - Pad was cleaned using a nilon brush on the fly after EVERY set, at times after 2-3 passes. An air compressor is next on my wish list now. Luckily this project spanned across 4 days so I was able to use only 2 pads and washing them every night. - Paint was refined using Megs 205 on Uber (or BnS) Green Pad with the DeWalt rotary, starting at 1500 RPM with firm pressure (relatively as this was on the Rotary) , reducing the pressure on subsequent passes and reducing the RPM on the final 2 passes. Took me around 3.5 minutes per small section. As with the compounding stage sections were kept small, for example a front fender would be divided into 3 sections above the body line and another one under the body line. Anyway here are some pictures of the finished product First, some close up shots of some panels of the car inside the garage and under lights (halogens, fenix led, and camera flash) Some reflection shots inside the garage It was early in the morning yet dust have started to build up Under the sun I think my exposure settings were off here, the sun was shining brightly , I missed judged the exposure It got better on this one In the end the owner (a friend of mine in the w202 club of Indonesia) was very happy with the results and was reinforced with the importance of proper washing regime. Thank you so much for spending time to view this post, I really appreciate it Ps: dear moderators, please feel free to move this post if it is not posted in the appropriate section Regards, Bob
Nice correction. Excellent write-up, very detailed and easy to follow your thought process and methods, perfect for new guys like me to learn more! Thanks!
Thanks for the very detailed write up! Wow crazy how you spent 4 days on the project. Props to you man.
Brian, Gale, and Vinsanity, i wanna thank you reading this post and commenting, i really appreciate it guys! im glad if u find this post informartive. feel free to ask if there's anything i could help. regards, Bob
