Paint Correction On Ford XR6 Turbo

This Ford XR6 was a typical example of a cut n polish gone terribly wrong. It’s always car like this that need paint correction to bring them back up and it’s always usually a Professional car detailer that only delivers it

Absolutely covered in swirls holograms and some rather deep scratches this had to have at the very least some serious paint correction just to make it look good.
It’s these detailing jobs however that make car detailing interesting.

Would Car Detailing Fix This Damage From Scratches And Swirl Marks ?

No it wouldn’t. This wasn’t car detailing though but more paint correction. Detailing was not going to fix this. It was actually detailing using crap products and wool pads being used by a shonk detailer that caused all this damage to begin with. The idea here was to remove the swirls, scratches and holograms using the very same tools that put them there……but with technique.

The customer who owned this XR6 was clearly distraught at the onslaught of damage inflicted to his car and rightfully so. Who wouldn’t be ? Judging by the level of damage here, it appears this car is clearly a victim of coffee car washes. Not so much by the swirls or the holograms but more by the un-uniformed depth of scratches in the paint. The scratches were that severe, some wet sanding was required

It was just too obvious as I’ve seen this sort of damage hundreds of times before with scratch damage like this and the usual culprits are cafe car washes or even automated car washes. Many people believe that hand car washes are better.

Not really.Hand car wash staff believe that the rag they use to wash car wheels, is the same rag they use to wash car paint.Well, this is the result of that idea. Well obviously the first thing I wanted to was to get rid of what ever I could without resulting to wet sanding or any of the harsh cutting compound stuff, so I started with the roof using some Optimum compounds.

I avoided the cutting compound and went straight to the polishing compound on a hydropad to see what results I would get. The results were impressive enough to continue to the finishing point as that combination was working quite well.

However this didn’t apply to the whole car. That was too easy. When it came time to remove the swirls, scratches and holograms off the boot and rear wing this required full paint correction with wool buffs. Didn’t want to even waste time trying to use foam pads.

I needed wool pads to rip this stuff out real fast or I was going to be removing scratches all day long as these scratches were somewhat deep. If you look to the image on the right you can clearly see the depth of damage done to the boot of this XR6

The sides of the XR6 were able to be restored using just a hard cutting pad with a pure polish and then finished off with car paint protection. Although the scratch damage was still severe in these sections, it wasn’t as deep as the horizontal surfaces of the car which obviously always have much harder or
heavier pressure applied when washing or carrying out butcherous car detailing services. The top surfaces always generally see much more wear and tear.

Although I avoided using serious compounds on the sides of the vehicle, it still did take some time to finish off using just a strong polish. I sometimes winder in cases like this, if you are actually better off just going the extra mile and using cutting compounds to begin with so that you don’t work as hard.

You get a great deal of satisfaction when customers bring you a car that looks like crap and you take this car and turn it into a glowing and streaming butterfly that just screams in traffic ” HEY LOOK AT ME ” It’s absolutely incredible what can be achieved when you apply technique, experience and effort to paintwork the right way.

The next phase of this operation had to be applied to the bonnet of the vehicle. This has turned out to be quite a car detailing process.
Different combos on different panels. The Bonnet however was the worst effected where some wet sanding was required. After having taken
paint measurements bouncing around the 128 microns, I figured I had enough to do the paint correction side of things and get this XR6 out of trouble.

The bonnet actually took a considerable amount of time to restore. With loads of scratches,swirls,holograms it was a go slow process to get the front end of this car looking its best.  Basically I wet sanded various areas of the bonnet that needed wetsanding in order to remove deeper scratches and started buffing with the wool pad to remove all sanding marks together with Meguiars 205.  Once done, I followed through with Meguiars 105 to remove any marring left behind by the pad and cutting compound. The results of this paint correction procedure were stunning to say the least.