Skyline GTR detailed to showroom condition. 99% correction.

[Kunzz]

then it would confirm his liking of the wheels

[cobrAA]

Quick 30 minutes shooting with his little son :P

[mightyrocker]

That GTR detail is legendary, wow!

[cobrAA]

Héhé thanks buddy! Sometimes I whishI could step my game up.. but I can't see what else I could do to make it even better or more detailed.

[cobrAA]

then it would confirm his liking of the wheels

It's because i focused on the '' it look like'' and that bashing between running real or fake te37 is getting overly talked, no need to start another discussion in this thread about it

[cobrAA]

Bumping for a friend:

[MKIV]

Unbelievable! You're a legend Alex!

Please please pleasssssse come to Ontario and set aside a day to detail mine and a few friends' cars! We'll pay good for your service!

[cobrAA]

My friend, this is not a problem. I already said it before, I'm down to do it. However, I did make a thread about it last summer, I had propably 6 person interested, one by one cancelled, so I kinda lost interest because of the lack of serious.

#2, I also went to skymeet so hopefully some people might want to have a chat with me and nobody came.

Next season, I'm suppose to drive est to halifax ( a 15 hours drive). If your dead serious, I will gladly come over


P.S: Thanks for the kind word!

[cobrAA]

If you want to follow my work or get in touch more easily. Please show some support by liking my new pages :

https://www.facebook.com/Waxxonspa

[cobrAA]

Although you pay big money for carbon fiber, it usually come up with a very poor finish and most people don’t care because they pay so much that they will only tell themselves : well it’s carbonfiber! But I also admit I was quite impressed of the finish on OEM carbon fiber parts from Audi and Porsche.

Anyways, lets look at this poor finish:













And here you can see the test spot I did on the very end left:


What I end up doing is a 3-step polish using Menzerna Compound and I finished with the new HD polish. I then carbon fiber cleansed the diffuser with Swissvax Cleaner Fluid and gave 3 coat of Definitive Wax Number One ( I waited about 12 hours between each coats)

Here’s the end result:





Nice gloss! Remember how white-faded it was before:




Perfectly clear now!














What I can say is that I bought 2 gallon of HD polish… I think it work quite good and very easy to remove, a tad easier than menzerna. I’m still unsure if Menzerna deliver a better finish than HD, I will test that when summer comes.

As for Number One, nothing has changed from my review done a couple days ago. Look-wise, I think you can see the CF is a lot more dark now and I think Number One paired with Cleaner Fluid had a role to play in this darkening/wet look effect. Just like I stated, same application but this time I used less wax and it removed very easily! Best if you leave 5-10 minutes so I would recommend you do half of the car and then wipe-off then do the other half of it.

Hope you enjoyed!

[speedracer1610]

Héhé thanks buddy! Sometimes I whishI could step my game up.. but I can't see what else I could do to make it even better or more detailed.

I would have removered the wheels and cleaned them in and out. I would have also cleaned the wheel wells / shocks and brake calipers.

[cobrAA]

I would have removered the wheels and cleaned them in and out. I would have also cleaned the wheel wells / shocks and brake calipers.

I already have brush that clean the wheel inside so no need to remove them but I coated the rims with a nano-coating anyways. and everything else is done everytime I wash the car.

[cobrAA]

Okay i'm about to drop the *bomb*... till then first part here!!

Une version française va possiblement venir au fur et à mesure, mais au moment d'écrire ce thread, j'ai décidé de le faire en une langue seulement car je crois que j'en ai BEAUCOUP à dire et la traduction couperait le beat solide de la progression de mon thread !

So... what happened since 2010 when this thread/car won best of show thread from Autogeek's staff ? Well.. I simply maintained the car while the car attended some car show. The car had little respray due to new addition like greddy rear spat and M3 mirror style. I had to match the orange peel with the rest of the car but nothing major.

In 2011-12, Chemical guys gave us a free pot of Chemical Guys Celeste dettaglio V2 to thanks us for letting them use some of our pictures for their new ads. Cool! Another ''award'' from this detail

And there comes 2013... CATASTROPHE!! The car had his fender rolled.. However 2 fender out of 4 cracked.. leaving paint cracked and not looking too pretty.. the rear spat fitting done by the bodyshot wasnt too pretty... Long story short, about 40% of the car got resprayed! So, I didn't get to detail the car before the respray was done. Make sens right ?

Then.. the day the respray happened, the color-match was HORRIBLE!!! I mean seriously horrible... So, the painter agreed to re-do the job and apologize. However it took 3 weeks due to vacation and busy week. fast forward 3 weeks later.. I finally got to see the car repainted correctly, but with nasty orange peel :

If you don't know what orange peel are, they are pretty common when you get bodyshop work done on your car, you will get these kind of reflection from the paint. Sometimes it's worse than other and depending on the color of the car it show less or more. So think about an orange and how wavy the peel is.. and now look at these pictures:




Look closely at the reflection of the wall and the sky on the trunk.. can't you see the reflection is wavy and not clear ?

And now... does one side appears to be MUCH MORE clear than the other ?




And now here's a close up...

orange peel :



No orange peel ( or very minimal) crystal clear reflection :


To achieve this kind of finish, we need to go through an exhaustive process that takes hours to achieve. We first need to wet-sand the paint using a ''coarse'' grit ( coarse for finishing paint but not coarse if you were to perform bodyshop job like grinding paint!) to actually level the paint by knocking off the peel effect on the paint. Imagine the paint as a mountain.. every high spot is actually what we call the peel/wavy effect. What I need to do is sand those mountain/high spot to level the paint so that I obtain a paint that doesn't have any high-spot. Like this:



After that you will realize that some contamination might have stuck INTO the paint.. that's what we call ''grain''. It's actually small dust particle that get trap on the paint during the paint curing inside the paint booth. So far from what I saw.. no matter how hard the bodyshop try to avoid them, they're will always be a few trap on the paint. To correct this, you need to use another speciality tools with coarser grit paper that will knock these grits individually: ( this process can be very long!)




Once everything is done.. meaning the orange peel is removed and we achieved an uniform ''matte'' looking paint, it's time to refinish the paint using a finer coarse paper. Usually these paper will have a foam backing so they will contours the mountain instead of ''knocking them'' and leveling them. The problem with the first and second step is that the paint is very hazy/matte looking. In order to bring back the shine, you need to refinish the paint ; this means that the finer grit will be able to remove the coarser grit I just put on the paint. ( ie: If you have #1000 grit, you need a #2000 grit to remove the #1000 grit and then, you could use a #3000 or #5000 grit to remove the #2000 grit you created before). So this is how the paint looked after a #3000 grit pass:


Remember how it looked once fully polished ?


Oh gosssshh!! isn't that pretty ? Some ferrari and uber-expensive car don't even have that kind of clarity in their paint!

As you can see, the problem with wet-sanding is not to level the paint or remove the orange peel, the real challenge ( and this is what set a part the real detailer to the ''other'') is to finish the paint to a PERFECT finish without leaving any compounding haze, small dust particle, pigtail, sanding mark etc.

So after I was done with the trunk, I started working the rear fender:



And I was done for the day......................................

Well not exactly..........

[cobrAA]

1 hour later after leaving the bodyshop. this happened:








**** !!!!!!

So basicly, we had to respray the car twice to get it done, I already worked 5-6 hours into the paint and then comes this accident... The damage ?

- corner light
- headlight
- rebar
- leaking intercooler
- destroyed bumper
- bended frame


Someone offered to repair the fiberglass bumper, he said he would do the rought part and then a bodyshop would just have to sand it and put some body filler and prep it:




Well.. after doing 3 different bodyshop, not one wanted to work with this bumper, they all said the repair was too rought and not worth going over. they would have to start over.. Oh great! More time and money wasted.

Then someone offered to trade a headlight to help the owner repair his car. Next thing we knew is that Nissan decided to make 2 different type of headlight in the little 5 yr timespan the R32 existed. As you can see here, notice the DRL not the same and one take H3C while the other take H1:



So while the headlight were out, I was asked to paint the inside of the light black instead of chrome to achieve a meaner look:

Looking prettier isn't ?




It took me about 5 hours to do.. remove the cover, polish inside the cover with a glass polish, polish the outside with a glass polish and glass polishing pad, sand the chrome and give multiple coat of paint, then I had to re-seal the cover with urethane we use at my shop for windshield. You think we were done hen!??!

Well no... i left the headlight on my drying machine and went to grab my camera to take some pictures, when I was in my room I heard a big '' smash''.... yes... one headlight fall off the drying machine and the cover being glass.. broke again!!! Believe it or not.. I had to supply another glass cover because it was totally my fault.. Basicly, I didn't make a penny doing this mod..

Rebar was bought at a JDM shop, Intercooler were upgraded to a bigger Greddy unit, corner light were replaced for a pair of smoked clear corner by jdmgarage.

Now into the bend frame... we went to a bodyshop i don't wish to name on the south shore of montreal ( but maybe I should...) and they took the car 2 months to fix the frame... Here's how the car came back to the bodyshop:

Hood hinge could barely close, headlight was still 1 inch pushed inside the hood. nothing aligned right, huge gap between the headlight and corner light.. What we latter found out is that they simply shimmed the fender and other parts of the body to make it ''close'' but that it!! What a fuckin shame... and they call them professional bodyshop...

oh and they also did this beautiful glue job free of charge........


In the mean time, the rear bumper got damaged from someone.. maybe at the bodyshop!


So imagine how the owner felt ; He used to have a uber-clean skyline and out of a sudden, he get 2 respray because the first one isnt done right. Then, he try to fix the bumper but have to be redone, get his headlight done and then by accident i smash one, then he get his frame fixed and learn that he have to get it redone... what a shitty year!!
Beside maybe this funny moment lol.. We shared a pic bumper-less with a Veyron :P



So the car went into storage like that....

Part 1 done... stay tuned for part 2 ( which is what was done for 2014!)

[rob_96]

Great job.... what do you charge