This is one of my favorite projects. What can I do to a 28 year old car with 90K miles that’s mostly original? It’s not a garage queen, not a track car, just an honest driver that’s been out in the world for too long. This car had a lot of surface contamination and a …
When you have a single panel that needs repainting, it can be expensive to take the job to a paint shop. To do it right, they will need to blend the paint across multiple panels which adds costs and is time consuming. If the car is a driver, it may not be worth it. So …
I did the paint correction and ceramic coating on this M3 last Fall and the owner asked me to refresh the interior to match. This is perhaps the cleanest E36M3 I’ve ever seen so I was glad to have the opportunity to get the interior to a condition that matched the paint. BMW leather generally …
I love stickers on race cars. But just adding stickers doesn’t make a car a race car. So do you add stickers or not? If headed to the track: absolutely. Stickers make you faster and can be used to hide all kinds of blemishes. But for your collector car? There’s always the risk that leaving …
Read more “Stickers on Race Cars: Expert Tips for Application and Removal”
If you have an older sports car, especially a driver, just because it’s well worn, doesn’t mean it has to be worn out. Take the example of this 1997 Ferrari F355 I worked on earlier this month. This is a 39K mile, gated six speed spider which looks wonderful. When you opened the door however, …
One of the most powerful cleaning tools in your garage should be a good steam cleaner. Not only is it great for cleaning interior surfaces like carpets, leather, vinyl, and fabrics it can also be useful for exterior cleaning. I use it on deep contamination of fragile paint; cleaning under the hood and cleaning in …
This Z8 seemed to clean up well with just a washing, but the paint felt like sand paper. Not sure if it was covered with tree sap or what, but it took clay bar, compound, and multiple passes with polish to remove. The 23 year old paint was thick but hard. I used Meguiar’s M105 …
If you have a car that you take to the track often, you know how hard it is to remove the rolled-up rubber marks you get on the exterior. They don’t often damage the paint, they just require some intense polishing to remove. And that’s the risk: If you aren’t careful with the polishing, you …
Sometimes there’s just nothing left to polish. This is especially true with cars from the 90’s. When the auto industry switched over to water-based clear coat paints, many of the earlier products started to fail before the new-car warranty even expired. The other area which caused problems was in door jams and trunks. The flexible …
In a previous blog post, I mentioned that my core service is a detail with ceramic coat, which I offer at three service levels: good, better, and best. Since I’m working mostly with cars that are drivers, it makes no sense to do a concourse-level detail. That said, some cars do need more attention than …