This Mercedes CL500 was brought in over the summer for a complete interior and exterior detail. The owner was attending a car show and wanted the car looking its best, so we set a date to bring the car in, which was a couple days before my wedding. The car was in pretty good shape to begin with, but needed a little bit of work to get it looking its best. It had recently been in the body shop getting some paintwork done, so it was a bit dirty as you can see in the pictures below. After snapping a few before pictures, Ryan and I pulled the car in the shop to start prepping the paint for polishing. We gave it a standard hand wash and gave all the tires, wheels and wheel wells an extensive cleaning. We noticed the paint was beading heavily, which meant there was some sort of glaze, wax or sealant present, which would have to be removed in order to make polishing easier. After using a degreaser to remove whatever products were on the paint, we also noticed that there was some overspray present. We clayed the exterior, which did remove some of the overspray, but we weren’t able to remove all of it. The following pictures were taken after the wash and prep. You can see the overspray present on most of the panels, which would be removed once we started polishing. The paint had a very dry and sterile look to it and lacked any real gloss or depth, but not for long!!! Unfortunately, we were pressed for time, so we were not able to take any during pictures of the polishing process. We masked off all trim, badges and moldings and got started on the polishing. Since the paint was pretty hard, we decided to perform a 3-step polishing treatment to get the paint looking as perfect as possible. For the first step, we used Meguiars 105 compound paired with a Surbuf pad via DA polisher to remove the serious defects. This left the paint looking a little hazy, which was to be expected from such an aggressive combo. To clear up the compounding haze left from the M105, we followed behind with Menzerna Power Finish using an orange foam pad via DA which really brought the paint back to life. At this point, the paint was looking defect free, but we performed an additional polishing step to ensure a perfect, swirl-free finish because well, that’s what we do here at UCC! For the final polishing step, we used Menzerna 85rd paired with a black uber foam pad. We then applied Menzerna Power Lock sealant to the exterior paint and wheels for its great looks and durability. Here are the final results!
Great job it looks completely different now.:thumb: I have to say that the front has some negative camber going on but thats totally another topic.
Beautiful work, some gorgeous flake in that paint. No shots of the back of the CL though? Was trying to get a proper look at that exhaust...
Great job! why use a black uber with 85rd, and not a blue uber? Also, one of the pictures appears to show the driver side inner tailpipe is bent downward?
