A Paint Correction Detail we performed on a lovely Rosso Red Ferrari in Wicklow last month.
At this stage we had just finished an hours Wash/Prep on this Ferrari 360. The car is 13 years old and was in pretty good condition. It turns out that we actually gave this car its first clean in 2000 and it’s nice to be back working on bringing it back to its original pristine condition.
One or two panels, the front bumper and a couple of the sills have had a re-spray and still had a little orange peel on them which we wet sanded and then refined to a deep gloss.
The current owner had done a bit of work himself but and we took over where he finished off. The bonnet in particular had a few issues which unfortunately didn’t come out on our video but we had to do a three stage correction on the bonnet to bring the finish back out. All in we spent 10 hours on the paint.
It’s a pleasure vehicle, and what you want with this car is for the paint to jump right out at you, to really give a nice level of gloss and what we’ve done here is to essentially gloss the paint to its maximum potential using a combination of pads and polishes. Afterwards we applied a ceramic sealant to the paint, to really lock the finish in.
With the weekend use that this car is going to have, the ceramic sealant is going to last about a year and a half. On a daily driver you can expect this to last 6 to 9 months.
In this video we were about 1.5 hours into corrective work on the bonnet and 1.5 hours into a few of the other panels. We had come across some very heavy scratches from bird lime, poor washing technique with brushes and a few random deep scratches, one going across the entire bonnet. We had to remove about 20 microns from the lacquer, which is quite substantial in terms of corrective work, especially on a supercar.
Now I’m going to finish off the bonnet, compound the arches and the rest of the car is going to get a single stage corrective polish and then a ceramic gloss enhancement.
There were a few surprises thrown in. We weren’t expecting the depth of the scratch in the bonnet for instance. Sometimes you just don’t know what you’re going to be confronted with and that’s why you should always call a professional to work on the paintwork on your car.
The owner wanted the scratch out and it was in our ability to do just that. It was safe and within the limits of the available lacquer. Using wool on the deeper scratches and quite a heavy cutting compound was unusual for a car of this calibre. But taking our time and being extremely precise, both the owner and us are very pleased with the results of the detail.
