Hey guys, welcome back to the Bespoke Automotive Refinement Podcast, Kansas City’s auto detailing service. So today I want to talk about one of the jobs that I’ve been working on over the last couple of days. I think it really raises some questions and brings up some answers to some of the different nuances of paint correction, ceramic coating, repainting a car, especially when you have a higher-end show car, which seems to be a lot of what I work on.
So I offer a lot of different Kansas City auto detailing packages. I would say the most popular one, the most recurring one that I offer is the paint correction service. There’s different levels of the paint correction.
We’ve got the one stage, the two stage, the three stage. Today and yesterday I’ve been working on a client’s car that I actually paint corrected about a year ago. It’s a late 50s Mercury.
Beautiful car. This car has won numerous high-level concourse shows. This car’s traveled all over the world.
And when you get into that level of show car, you begin refining things. So this particular client had the car about 80% finished, and had me do a paint correction a year ago. Car looked perfect.
He took it to some concourse shows. The car won. And where he got dinged on points, he brought the car back, had things prefabricated, had things repainted.
And that led to the car needing other paint corrections. So about six months ago, this client who I manage his entire car collection, and he has, he’s at 12 cars right now. But this one car in particular, man, he really, really gets this thing dialed in.
He called me and he said, all right, I just did my final fabrication work on the exterior, had the paint work done. I’m ready to have you come in, complete the paint correction and get this thing ready for next season. And I hadn’t really seen the car under any light until today because I’ve been working on so many other Kansas City auto detailing projects.
So I show up at his place, I get my lights on the car and I see horrible scratching. I mean, it looked like whoever had been fabricating this car was laying tools on the roof and they were pulling them off of it, sliding them off of it, causing deep scratching. The deck lid that apparently hadn’t even been touched had a foggy tint in the paint, looked like the paint was failing from the inside out, but it turns out it was just some chemical that got on the deck lid.
And then the entire rear quarter and doors were just heavily scratched. So I got my light on the car and I began performing the paint correction on this car. And after doing some compounding, after testing some different pads and polishes, we decided that the best Kansas City auto detailing service that this car needed was a three-step paint correction again.
So this is actually the second three-stage paint correction that I’ve done on this car. When I did this car a year ago, I did a full wet sand on the entire car. I did 3,000 grit, 5,000 grit, cut, compound, polish.
And thankfully the painter who painted this car, he left enough clear coat on it that we can do paint corrections on this car for days and it’s going to be good. But there were so many deep scratches in this car from, I think, fabrication work, changing hands, being shipped all over the world. And honestly, it’s such a common thing.
In fact, one of the things that really helps keep me in business with my Kansas City auto detailing company are cars that leave body shops with fresh paintwork. You know, they spray the car and you can be a phenomenal painter and still miss these things. You knock it down with a rotary, hit it with some polish, it looks phenomenal but it still has those rotary marks in it.
It still has those hologram marks in it. It still has buffer trails in it. So today I opted to begin wet sanding the entire sides of the car, parts of the roof, the entire deck lid, and parts of the hood.
And this process, thankfully this client of mine that I’m working with, I’ve done all of his cars at this point. He’s just happy that I’m there to work on his stuff. What was supposed to be a basic polish has now turned into a three-step paint correction because this car changed hands so many times, had so much fabrication work done on it and then respray work that this car just needed another paint correction.
And that’s one thing I want to touch on is when you purchase one of our Kansas City Auto Detailing packages, you may think that the car is good to go. But if you use it, whether it’s a show car, whether it’s a daily driver, whether it’s a weekend car, or you know if it’s a car that you’re just shipping all over the world to take to these shows to win these prestigious concourses and these prestigious car shows, there is no level of ceramic coating that we can put on a paint job that’s going to eliminate the the risk of scratches. Because you know we get things on our hands, we get salts and dust and dirt, and we touch the paint.
Or you know you’re wearing a bracelet, a sewer bracelet, and we reach on the roof of it to pull something back and then we scratch it. It’s so common to put micro scratches in cars that when you do a paint correction, as hard as this is to admit, it’s not done. It’s not like it’s a one-time deal, especially on a concourse level show vehicle.
These are things that are going to have to be maintained and kept up throughout your ownership of the car if you’re shipping it all over the world to have to attend these concourse shows. So thankfully this client obliged and we began wet sanding all of the surfaces and we are in the finishing stage of the process now. So I’ll be going out there tomorrow cutting the paint down, compounding it down, getting all the sanding scratches out or sanding scuffs out, re-compounding it, re-polishing it, and then doing another layer of ceramic coating.
Just because the car had so many other layers of paint that have been sprayed on it since I ceramic coated the car last, I’d be willing to bet if I were to re-spray this car, it would not be the way a coating should. Thus the car is inconsistently protected and we want to make sure that the entire car is protected. We want to make sure that the surface is protected.
We want to make sure the glass is protected and we want to make sure it’s all even. On a concourse vehicle specifically, the last thing we ever want is to have a rear deck lid that’s covered in orange peel and half the roof covered in orange peel and then the entire sides of the vehicle perfectly smooth. So when you get into that echelon of show vehicles, we want to make sure that it is 100% perfect.
Guys, I really thank you for tuning into this episode and if you guys have any Kansas City Auto Detailing services that you need, reach out to us today at 620-282-0402.