A friend of mine recommended my detailing services to his father and some of his friends out in California. When we first talked, we only talked about doing full correction jobs on 2 cars and possibly a couple more. Not really knowing what all I would be working on I packed up a small arsenal of detailing products and headed to California.

When it was all said and done I did 6 full corrections and also a hybrid correction. I was in California for 23 days and worked 21 straight days while I was there. Most days were at least 8 hours with some up to 14 . The cars I worked on included a Rolls Royce Ghost, Bentley Continental GT Mansory Edition, Ferrari 458 Italia, Ferrari 599 GTB, Ferrari 612 Scaglietti, Ferrari Superamerica, and a Porsche 911 Turbo. It was an incredible learning experience since I encountered the softest paint I had ever worked on and the hardest paint I had ever worked on.

When I got there they wanted me to start on a Rolls Royce Ghost and then we would talk about the other vehicles. When I first looked at the car I noticed a lot of swirls and some deeper scratches here and there. At first I thought this was going to be an easy car to do a full correction on, but I was wrong.

Here are some of the before photos.

As you can see there were lots of swirls and only a few deeper scratches. Since most of the defects looked to be surface defects I thought to myself this one was going to go smooothly and quickly. I started out with your normal 2×4 grit guard wash and then went on to claying the car. When I got to my testing is when I started to get nervous about this correction job. I first tried a Meguiars Microfiber pad and some Meguiars D300, this combo took about 7 passes to get all of the defects out. I always use D300 first as a test to see if I’m dealing with a really hard paint or a really soft paint, SO this test told me it was rock hard paint.

When dealing with really hard paint you have to change up your method to get a lot more cut out of what you have available. After a lot of testing I ended up using a Meguiars Microfiber pad with Meguiars M101. Although M101 is a very aggressive compound and can do some serious damage to paint, it was perfect for this car. Along with an agressive compound I used a very stiff backing plate that wouldn’t absorb much pressure. I also set my DA at speed 6 to get more cut. When I was running the machine on the car I was using a great deal of pressure, enough to make my arms tired after a few hours of working. With these different techniques I was able to knock out most of the defects with 2 passes, compared to 7 passes with normal methods. If I knew I was going to work on this paint again I would definitely use a wool pad.

One thing I was looking out for was the amount of heat I was producing. High speeds and lots of pressure produces a lot of friction, friction produces heat, and heat produces burned paint. I made sure I kept my machine moving and felt the paint to see how hot it was. Just because I was using a DA does not mean that it is completely safe. With very aggressive methods a DA can easily damage paint, even hard paint. On the lighter side, heat can make pads delaminate, warp backing plates, cause oils in compounds to dry out faster, and cause premature machine failure. Heat continues to build up while you are working if you do not let things cool down every once in a while. With this car I would wait between working sections to let my backing plate and pads cool down. I would also cool my backing plate down with compressed air in between sections.

The paint on this thing was incredibly hard but while working on it I noticed how great the paint was. There were no factory defects in the paint at all. The owner of the car explained to me how in-depth Rolls Royce’s painting process was and you could tell. This makes for an outstanding finish when the paint is polished out properly.

Here is a 50/50 shot of the trunk lid when I was working on it.

The next 4 pictures are before and after of some of the deeper scratches. They took a while to get out but as you can see they looked much better after.

The hood of this car was painted matte silver. You can’t really do much with matte paint and if you hit it with your buffer at all you will completely ruin it. Knowing how much this car cost I didn’t want to take any chances at all so I put tape around any area I would come close to with my machine.

This picture is before polishing and after polishing. Compounding with such an aggressive compound was leaving a haze over the whole car so I polished it with some new polishes and pads that I was testing for Meguiars. Jason Rose from Meguiars stopped by to give them to me and gave me some great pointers for working with this ridiculously hard paint.

Chemical Guys E-Zyme curing!!!! I wanted to use a very durable wax that was also going to add a lot of gloss and depth so I went with E-Zyme.

Here are pictures of the areas I photographed before I started. As you can see it looked a lot better once done.

And here we begin with the after shots. The reflection that this thing had afterwards was crazy. As I said earlier when you are working with great paint it looks so good when you are done.

It took me three days to complete this car but when it was done it looked amazing! Hope you guys liked the article and here is a teaser photo of the next article 🙂

Thanks for reading!!!