Paint correction, avusblau E36 M3 - pics

[deepgreen]

I am still plugging away at the old E36. I don't have a lot of spare time, and I've spent nearly all of it in the last month out in the garage, beating away at my E36's finish. I do not believe the paint has ever been corrected since it rolled out of the factory in the fall of 1994.

Here's a very abbreviated version of the process:

Wash - Meg's Gold Class, autogeek foamgun, 2 MF mitts, gritguard bucket

Clay - Meg's fine white clay with Gold Class as lube

Mask - 3M blue masking tape

Paint correction:
Harbor Freight Rotary - Orange 5.5" Lake Country CCS foam pad - Menzerna Super Intensive Polish
PC 7424 - Grey 5.5" LC CCS pad - Menzerna 106FA Nano Polish (only used on one section of hood)
PC 7424 - Blue 7.5" finishing LC CCS foam pad - 3M Ultrafine/Ultrafina

LSP: Zaino Z2, 1 coat so far

Here are a few things I've learned:

- This isn't really for pencil necked geeks like me. Polishing a car 3 times in a day takes some arm strength. It took me a couple weeks, panel by panel because my arms and hands kept tiring out.
- Control and concentration is critical. You cannot do this on mental autopilot or while tired or distracted. You have to pay attention.
- The right amount of polish, on a clean pad, is critical. If the pad cakes up you will be doing a lot of muscle work and getting nothing done.
- SIP/orange is not enough to deal with 14 years of scratches. Neither is a PC. Some of the scratches are too deep for it to handle. I did not want to go to Power Gloss on wool and risk overpolishing, though.
- How much time do you want to spend on masking? Wrong question. Ask yourself how sorry you want to be that you didn't spend more time on masking. Then, mask accordingly. You can't be too careful and you can't use too expensive tape. It took me about 3 hours and $15 in tape to mask the car and that is about right, though in a couple places I wish I'd been more careful.
- Claying wheels! This was the single best thing I did for the look of the car. They went from dingy mud collectors to radiant metalflake chalices of light.
- Forever Black! On the side trim. This was the #2 best thing I did to improve the look of the car.
- The 7.5 inch finishing blue Lake Country pad, on a PC, with Ultrafina, is really satisfying to use. It feels great - easy, you can tell when it's working, when it's done - and makes the finish absolutely magnificent.
- The place where I did a 3-step - SIP to Nano to Ultrafina - looks better than the rest of the car. I just did not have the energy to do Nano over the entire car, as I'd already been over it twice with SIP. I got lazy.
- Z2 has almost no filling ability at all.
- Avus Blue really does not have a green tint to it anywhere. I have been telling people it did for 13 years. All that yellow came off with the clay :rolleyes

OK, I know you all skipped down to the pics anyway. Here they are:

Before - sort of a dingy, dirty blue car:
http://homepage.mac.com/d_halgren/detail/z2/dingy.jpg

Before: Dirty wheel:
http://homepage.mac.com/d_halgren/detail/z2/mud.jpg

Before: Paint, with random-depth scratches and waterspot etching. All the paint was scratched and etched like this, at least this bad - it's hard to photograph:
http://homepage.mac.com/d_halgren/detail/z2/rids.jpg

Before: Bird dropping etching, 8 years old
http://homepage.mac.com/d_halgren/detail/z2/dung.jpg

Before: Bird dropping etching, catching sunlight:
http://homepage.mac.com/d_halgren/detail/z2/dung2.jpg

After:
http://homepage.mac.com/d_halgren/detail/z2/after.JPG

After, reflection on hood - it's like a mirror:
http://homepage.mac.com/d_halgren/detail/z2/mirror.jpg

After, close up where bird dropping was, with sun - no RIDS either. This part got SIP-Nano-Ultrafina-Z2:
http://homepage.mac.com/d_halgren/detail/z2/hood1.jpg

After, detail of above pic. Hood is in focus, that is the reflected sun viewed straight on - the RIDS are really gone:
http://homepage.mac.com/d_halgren/detail/z2/hood-close.jpg

After, wheel:
http://homepage.mac.com/d_halgren/detail/z2/wheel.jpg

After, hood - this part got SIP-Ultrafina-Z2, no nano. The difference is barely visible, I think:
http://homepage.mac.com/d_halgren/detail/z2/hood2.jpg

After, the roof - not all the scratches and pocks came out here - the two big ones are through the clear to the pigment layer - and there are some buffer trails too, which I didn't realize until just now.
http://homepage.mac.com/d_halgren/detail/z2/roof-after.jpg

After, door. I was lazy, only did SIP/Orange to the bottom door panel, didn't do the side skirts at all. You can see holograms in the bottom panel if you catch the right angle:
http://homepage.mac.com/d_halgren/detail/z2/holos.jpg

It's not perfect, but it looks pretty good for a 14 year old coat of paint. Need to get all the last bits of polish off the trim, put a couple more coats of Z2 or maybe Z5 to fill. Then I can start on the E93, which should be easier - just some dealer installed swirls to correct (on Black Sapphire!)

Thanks for looking! Glad to answer any questions anyone has, especially if people are looking for an amateur, "can I do this myself?" perspective.

[itciai]

Nice job! Very nice! :thumbup:
+1 on 14 year old paint!:buttrock

[simracer]

Wow, very nice. The wheels show phenomenal improvement and the after pic of the whole car looks really good too.

How did you like the HF rotary? I've heard it's more prone to bogging down if you try to lay into it unlike some of the more expensive rotary buffers. But, hey, it's also 1/4 to 1/6 the price (depending on whether or not you find it on sale) of even the least expensive name brand buffers.

And yes, Z2 has no fillers at all. Z5 has nominal filling abilities. People tend to use it more for the darkening effect that it has rather than its filling quality though.

Good luck on the E93. You should have it easier with Black Sapphire rather than Jet Black. That color is crazy soft. If you thought you had buffer trails with Avus Blue, you'd be chasing them all day on Jet Black.

[BMWRaja]

Nice work, looks great especially the wheels.

[SilverThing]

Excellent work & write-up!! Car looks great - the metal flake in that blue really pops!

[Seph540i]

Looks great! Wow. That was some buildup on those wheels though.

[deepgreen]

How did you like the HF rotary? I've heard it's more prone to bogging down if you try to lay into it unlike some of the more expensive rotary buffers.

Well, I don't have a DeWalt or a Makita to compare it to. It's solidly constructed and quite heavy - maybe twice the weight of the PC - which made it hard for me to control on the sides of the car when I had it cranked up. I have very skinny arms without a lot of meat or muscle to stabilize a buffer.

Its disc is 6" and I was using a 5.5" pad. I don't recommend this at all, it's a dumb idea in my opinion. I did manage not to gouge the paint with the edge of the disc - couple near misses - but the edges of the pad got overworked, and if the pad was not straight-on to the paint the buffer would crawl or hop 90 degrees - for example if you tilt it towards the top of the pad, the motion will drag the buffer right. If you tilt it down, it drags left.

If you got it aligned right, though, you could put a lot of energy into the polish. I almost never had it on max speed - SIP says run it at 1800, the max speed of the HF is supposedly 3700 rpms, so I generally had it one or two clicks below max and then when you dig in the full face of the pad it does slow down by 20% or so. There is a learning curve where you figure out what the tool will do, how it will behave in different areas.

I feel like with a bigger pad and a motor that had a little more ability to keep the same speed, I could have done better work, finished the SIP down to jeweling-polish levels before I dried out the lubricant, done it consistently in all areas of a square panel. At some point you gotta say, though, you know what, this is a hobby, not a career. :)

Thanks for all the kind comments. The above pics are about paint correction - I will take some 'glamour pics' tomorrow after I complete the 2nd coat of Z2 and clean the trim up.

[Bimmer325]

Please expand on what masking is. What is it/when do you do it? The car looks incredible and I give you props, i would get too lazy doing all this. I worked on a black GTi for 3 days and was exhausted at the end. The M hasnt gotten that treatment yet haha

[PuckMan]

Bimmer325 - I realize your question is directed to deepgreen but I'll help out by saying that masking is when you apply blue painters tape (or equivalent low adhesive masking tape) to the rubber trim pieces, plastic pieces (e.g. door handles etc.),seams, crevices, badges etc. to avoid running a high speed/heat producing spinning rotary buffer over those areas. It helps by protecting burn through of plastic pieces, dust/polish accumulation in crevices and seams and ugly black rubber transfer onto your pads. I mask after I've washed and clayed then dried. It's a precaution taken just before you start machine buffing.

As deepgreen mentioned, it is a good idea to spend a little time masking off those ares compared to potential damage or dust/polish removal after you're done buffing and polishing. The tape takes a little while to apply but comes off very quickly leaving only a few areas to do by hand or with a less aggressive method. I remove all the tape before I do my AIO and LSP application.

[deepgreen]

PuckMan is right, not much to add to his explanation.

Basically wherever you put the masking tape the polish will not reach. This includes crevices, plastic trim, windshields, hood and other vents, and sharp edges in the sheetmetal (which are particularly susceptible to being overpolished.)

Now if you mask off too much paint next to these edges, the scratches in it don't get polished out, so you have a stripe of uncorrected paint near every edge. This is unavoidable, but you'd like to make this small as possible so it can take a long time to mask.

I didn't bother masking the middle part of my driver's side sidetrim, planning not to touch it with the buffer, but the buffer did in fact swipe over it a couple of times and turned it white with ground-in abrasive really quickly. Also, when the buffer goes over tape or bumps, abrasive cakes up there quickly and makes a mess, so you want flat, smooth masked edges and you want to not run the buffer over them any more than you have to.

I am a pretty careful person, but I was constantly frustrated about these things. And I did fail to mask off a couple crevices, which means I'm going to have to go at them with a Q-tip to get the white abrasive out. That's a pain.

[Court M3]

Damn Californians still can get out and detail their cars!! :(

Car looks great, you did and outstanding job on those wheels.