Leaderboard

Thanks James, the wheels are selaed using G-Techniq W5 Wheel Armour and overcoated with G-Techniq Exo V4, this will hopefully stop any dirt and brake dust from sticking to them, for atleast 18months. I'll spray them with Citrus wash, jet wash them and then wash them with car shampoo and they'll clean up easily. On my 949Racing wheels the G-Techniq coating was starting to deteriorate, so I purchased some Bilt Hamber: https://www.bilthamber.com/auto-wheel, which I was very pleased with.

Due to the start of what is now 'the crisis' and a spare day a few weeks back, I was lucky enough to get access to a friend's garage space and set my mind to paint correction. I'd seen some minor defects (and one major one) when I was recently getting some strange goop off the passenger door and have been itching to spend some quality time with my new toy - a Rupes LHR 75E Mini. For detailing perverts like myself, the Rupes is the little Bigfoot offering for smaller areas and confined spaces. I used one for a few days a couple of years ago and fell in love, I finally convinced Santa to sort me out last winter. It's too small for most cars and people, as your only polisher, but despite that, I went for it because it's so light and low vibration that the drawbacks of larger areas taking longer, did not outweigh all the upsides in the trickier bits of our small and intricate panels. I will regret this decision if I ever own a Range Rover, but, lets face it, I will probably just use that as an excuse to buy a big Bigfoot anyway Back to the task at hand, exploiting an indoor workspace to go after this sort of thing. Nothing really offensive, just the stuff you notice in petrol station, filling up at night under the lights. The bonnet is a bit of a head scratcher as I have no idea where this has picked up so many defects from. I can only assume it's from washing, but I do try and observe a very gentle wash process. You can see on the spot, the swirls radiating out, accidentally the overhead strip shows what effects this has on larger reflections - they just look dull and dirty. This was only meant to be a single stage job (I only had 10 hours of time) so it was a small test patch to see what got a reasonable improvement and then blanket job all over. The yellow pad and polish combo from Rupes was fine, expect for one stubborn area on the rear bumper where I have gotten too close to the brambles in the work car park - SHAMEFACE - I know, it's unforgivable. Really hard to photograph this but there were three distinct scrapes all on the crease. The only 50/50 I took - not so easy to see the difference in the photo, but it is night and day in the video below. And this is the bonnet... ...which is miles away from the horror show I started with. Having access to an indoor workspace is an amazing treat for me (especially as it rained most of the day) but having a ramp as well? HEAVEN. My back was her so grateful for this. As a Johnny Pencilpusher in my day job, a day of physical effort is no minor undertaking After all the polishing, I laid down a coat of AMMO Reflex, which I am increasingly impressed with. It's so quick and easy to work with and has literally none of the pitfalls of the super strength ceramic stuff that I am yet to be impressed with - sorry I know I'm a dinosaur. Naturally after all that effort I could not resist a very quick glamour shot or two. If you've stayed with me this far, you may as well lose 90 more seconds on the movie too.

Having once had white wheels you'd think I'd learn.... Guess I'll be doing weekly wheel cleaning from now on. Thank you, I had to try the traditional Subaru colour scheme atleast once.