Megane R26
Today's detail saw me travel to Birmingham, to carry out a correction detail on a rather tasty red Mitsubishi Evo 8 FQ320.
Now, before I tackled this car, I spent some time looking over the various write ups on these beasts in the Showroom and Studio section, so was a little worried to see that people had been struggling with them, the soft, sometimes hard paint, and the very thin paint!!
This was going to be a tough one for me...
The car itself was fully washed and clayed for me before I arrived (and to a very high standard - thanks Ash!). I began by taking paint readings all over and assessing the swirls and scratches.
I was made aware that the front end had been resprayed recently, so as expected the paint here was a fair bit deeper than the rest of the car. The average for the non resprayed bits was about 110-120, going as low as 88 in some places. The resprayed parts were closer to 200.
As I began to test combinations, I soon discovered that the yellow and blue 3M pads weren't going to be enough (tested initially with Lime Prime and Megs 205). However, when I tried the #205 with a Menzerna Polishing Pad (Orange), I achieved superb results - near perfect levels of swirl removal and finishing down very well.
So, I progressed with this combination around the car... no clearcoat!! Or was there?? The resprayed parts had clearcoat on them, but not the original paint... it all corrected to the same level though, so it wasn't really an issue.
Correction wise I left a few RDS, particularly on the top of the boot, as the paint was very thin, so we opted to leave them for another day (the logic being that it will probably be machine polished again within the next 12 months, so that process should knock them back appropriately).
Anyway, on to the pics
General idea of the swirling:
Couple of 50/50's:
to finish, I opted for the Britemax 4/5/6S combo, which worked well on an Ultra Red 197 I did recently... some finished pics:
Thanks,
Russ.
Now, before I tackled this car, I spent some time looking over the various write ups on these beasts in the Showroom and Studio section, so was a little worried to see that people had been struggling with them, the soft, sometimes hard paint, and the very thin paint!!
This was going to be a tough one for me...
The car itself was fully washed and clayed for me before I arrived (and to a very high standard - thanks Ash!). I began by taking paint readings all over and assessing the swirls and scratches.
I was made aware that the front end had been resprayed recently, so as expected the paint here was a fair bit deeper than the rest of the car. The average for the non resprayed bits was about 110-120, going as low as 88 in some places. The resprayed parts were closer to 200.
As I began to test combinations, I soon discovered that the yellow and blue 3M pads weren't going to be enough (tested initially with Lime Prime and Megs 205). However, when I tried the #205 with a Menzerna Polishing Pad (Orange), I achieved superb results - near perfect levels of swirl removal and finishing down very well.
So, I progressed with this combination around the car... no clearcoat!! Or was there?? The resprayed parts had clearcoat on them, but not the original paint... it all corrected to the same level though, so it wasn't really an issue.
Correction wise I left a few RDS, particularly on the top of the boot, as the paint was very thin, so we opted to leave them for another day (the logic being that it will probably be machine polished again within the next 12 months, so that process should knock them back appropriately).
Anyway, on to the pics
General idea of the swirling:
Couple of 50/50's:
to finish, I opted for the Britemax 4/5/6S combo, which worked well on an Ultra Red 197 I did recently... some finished pics:
Thanks,
Russ.
