Hi bcgreen,

Your right about things getting out of hand on the Internet, I try my hardest to avoid flame wars at all costs. Been there, done that. No one wins, and it isn't any fun.

I guess what I meant by saying that I can do whole cars and can walk the talk is that because of the Internet, it is easy for people to hide behind their keyboard and present themselves as being a "Guru" in any field of interest.

When I post a suggestion or a method, it comes from first hand experiences, not retyping something I read somewhere else a year ago. I also always post under my real name, never a nickname, just a personal decision since I started posting on rec.autos (before it divided into rec.autos.tech and rec.autos.misc) back in 1992 or 1993 on the Usenet Newsgroups, long before web-based discussion forums existed.

I may have misinterpreted your intentions through your questioning, if I did… I am sorry. When you wrote that I wouldn't use the rotary buffer on a car in front of people I thought your were implying that I could talk a good game, but I wouldn't be able to back it up. And that observation is probably true for many people. If was wrong, I apologize. I'm mostly here to help and have fun. As you well know, there are a lot of people who hang out on discussion forums that… well tend to enjoy bashing people or products.

Now, on to your comments and questions…

Your quite right about the length of time it takes to professionally buff out a car. Most detailers work on the "Production" side of the industry because they make their profit in shear volume.

For me personally, I always expect to have a car for two days, with all of the rotary buffer work getting done the first day. Doing a car in 7 hours is something I have never done.

In my life, only once or twice has anyone ever brought me a car that had a nice finish and the purpose of bringing to me was just to "maintain" the already nice finish. So maybe 7 hours on these cars but that's because no rotary work was involved.

What I get are nice cars, usually some type of special interests car, something that is important to the owner and they have both time and money into it.

The finish is usually messed up. I would say that most of the time it has either been butchered by either a detailer or a painter, sometimes the owner or a dealership but usually the first two listed here.

And while I understand the time value of cutting out a step, I have never been able to do it.

I always do everything to the finish that needs to be done, (and can safely be done), in order to take the finish to it's ultimate potential. I always look at the car as though it were my own, and then I work on it accordingly.

This means time. At the end of the day, when I get the first coat of wax on, I usually leave it on overnight, not that it needs to be left on overnight, but because I'm tired, dirty and it's late, I want to go home. The last thing I want to do is to wipe wax off a highly polished surface with tired hands and arms.

So I always spend two days on ever car I detail and that's just polishing the paint. I don't do interiors, trunks or engine compartments, that would be another day and a separate charge. But, I don't do them, it doesn't interest me. I like polishing paint.

As far as tips and suggestions, it sounds like you have a system down, in order to do it faster you might compromise the quality of your work. If your doing this for money I would charge more. To do this, educate your customer on the benefits they will get out of having you do for more money versus taking it to someone else for less money.

This can be hard, I don't even want to go down this road except to say, even at what I have charged people in the past, I still find that when I accept work, I do it because I like the car, not for the money. If I did it for the money I wouldn't do it at all. That's not to say there hasn't been times that detailing cars paid the rent and put food on the table, it has, it's just a very hard way to make a living. Maybe things are different down here in California, maybe you can specialize and tap into a clientele that is willing to pay more for high quality, I don't know.

If you like, give me a call and we can talk further over the phone, I would be more than willing to meet you the next time you have a car to buff out and test out a couple of products or procedures.

Mike Phillips

1-800-854-8073 ext. 189

__________________
"Find a product you like and use it often"

Jack Anderson
Paint Instructor for PPG paints

Hi Mike:
Well I guess I am not so anal after all, so now I don't feel all alone. Maybe there are at least a couple more here but are hiding out. I won't make this long, but what you have just commented on is exactly the way I feel. I work on a car, not many so far, but I treat them as if they were my car, as if I am preparing for an auto show. There's nothing like taking that last swipe off the car and pulling it out into the evening sun and finding a flawless finish. Thats the real reward, the money is more or less icing on the cake. And to make sure the car is perfect I will ask my wife to "take a look and see if you can see anything that I may have missed." Four eyes are better than two. After that, it gets back into the owners hand. I almost feel as if it was an adopted kid that I have to return to its original parents. Sorry guys for ranting on, but thats my passion, not my day job, but my weekend passion, a real love, that comes from the love of the automobile.

BCGreen, Why Not Come to the Next Class...And Share some Info/tricks ?Mike Said That Meguiars MIGHT be Holding more Classes..And You Should Come!As I Will Also Attend Again
Mike Does Know His Stuff and Is a Great Person !
Meguiars Cant go Wrong with the Class! Just my .02

Hi all,

Some ramblings I thought I would add to this discussion.

The title to my how-to book is,

"The Art of Polishing Paint"

That's because I believe that the kind of work bcgreen does and the kind of work I try to do is truly an art form.

Anybody can wax a car, you know, like in the "Karate Kid", Wax-on, Wax-off, (I had a chance to buy those domain names, I hesitated and they were gone within a day or two).

It takes passion, the right tools, and the very human element of "caring" to produce a flawless finish.

That is why the only way you can take a diamond in the ruff and turn it into a Glistening Gemstone is to more or less, in your mind, adopt the car as your own. You can only put the kind of blood, sweat and tears into your labor of love if in fact you truly care about the thing you are doing, it has to be your passion.

It's crazy, I know. When I got to the point where I was never doing it for the money but instead I was doing it for

* The challenge of salvaging somebody else's toy (The typical customer I have worked for usually owns something really cool with a butchered finish, simply put, if someone can't fix it with a quality buff-out, it will have to be repainted.

* The self-satisfaction of "just doing it", (to borrow a line from "Nike")

I would often stand back before beginning to tape-off the car and ask myself, why?

I guess the answer is kind of like the answer the mountain climber gives, "because it's there".

I can tell you one thing, once you start, there is no turning back. As soon as you bring your buffer down on even one panel it's over, your committed. That's when your muscles kick in to overdrive and your focused determination override's everything, including lunch and breaks. (On the first day, I rarely stop once I begin except to down a Pepsi)

I would never want to discount any of my previous customers, or hurt their feelings, but the money has never been worth the work, it's a personal thing.

Here's a little story (I tell lots of little stories in the book, most are to teach a lesson however)

One of the hardest cars I ever buffed out was Terry Cook's highly customized, 1956 Lincoln Premier called the "Titanic". (Terry Cook is the former editor of Hot Rod magazine)

Here is a link to the car in case you have never seen or heard of it. The fender skirts alone are 9 feet long. I must say, with a 460 ford, it is a lot of fun to drive around considering it was my transportation while I was in Carmel for the Pebble Beach Concours d'elegance.

http://www.baldwinmotors.com/titanic.html

Two years ago, Terry had the car repainted and then ,"saved" the freshly painted car for me to sand down and buff out. While I appreciate the sentiment, I prefer to sand down a car with in a day or two after it has been painted, not 2 months later after the paint has "Case-Hardened".

Man O' Man, the paint on this car was "HARD".

I almost didn't do it. I did a "Test Spot", (covered in excruciating detail in my how-to book) and then stood back and shook my head, No! I wasn't going to do it.

My shop was the third floor in an 5 floor parking garage. I had a bucket of water, (no hose), and two 8' florescent lights. I got the car about 4:00 or 5:00pm. A couple more hours and it would be dark, very dark inside the parking garage.

I sat down and ate a sandwich and thought about it for a while and then decided, yes, I would do it.

I started sanding it down at approximately 6:00pm. I used the Meguiar's Unigrit #1500 paper, followed by the #2000 grit.

After sanding I put the finish through three very thorough machine buffing procedures followed by three hand steps. After I wiped that last coat of polish off, I pulled all of the tape and paper off and then detailed it out, (to me, polishing paint is polishing paint, detailing is something you do with a toothbrush).

I worked throughout the night, I never stopped until it was completely "done" which was 3:00pm the next day.

As soon as I was finished, the car was pulled out into the very middle of a car show in Monterey, CA on a eye blinding bright, hot August day. It was on display for the RM Auction to be held that weekend. I couldn't believe where they parked it, it was smack dab in the middle of a concrete arena with now shade anywhere. It was surrounded my mostly original and restored cars. Because of it's color and what it was, a 50's custom it stood out like a sore thumb. If I had made a mistake, it was going to show up big time.

Thankfully, Meguiar's proved itself, yet again in my eyes and the thousands of people that were there.

The next night it went to "Cars and Cigars" where it was placed under very bright outdoor lights, I'm not sure what kind, but very very bright. I prepped Scrape for both of these show also, thankfully it was still looking good since the last polishing job.

Now that I look back, I'm glad I chose to buff it out even though it was a lot of hard work.

Because the paint was so hard I had to really push on my trusty Makita buffer in order to get my sanding marks out. I pushed so hard, I put a crack in one of the stantions in my artificial leg in the process. To get through the rest of the weekend I put two stainless steel hose clamps around the cracked stantion and crossed my fingers that it would hold until I got back to Oregon.

But I digress.

Point being,

After calling on hundreds of body shops and detail shops and seeing how production work is done, and then talking with thousands of your average "Joe Consumers", about their car's finish, what they have and what they actually want. I could see that there is a huge chasm between the two sides.

I know from experience that a lot of the folks in the body shop and detailing industries want to do their best work but for reasons out of their control, they are unable to. For the most part, Speed is King, and usually, not always, but usually the cheapest products on the market are the products of choice, not by the workers but by the shop managers or the detail shop owners. Wool pads last longer than foam buffing pads so while they cost about the same to purchase initially, the wool pad is cheaper because it last so much longer. It also instill it's own scratch called buffer swirl.

The reason achieving a totally flawless finish is hard is because the thing your are working on is a thin oil-based "film" that is easily dulled and/or easily scratched. If creating totally, swirl-free flawless finishes were easy, everyone could do it. It's not, it takes experience, care and the right tools. And that's where Meguiar's fits in. They make the right tools. I would never tackle a job like Terry Cook's Titanic if I didn't have an arsenal of Meguiar's tools, (products) at my side.

Now while it's true I now work for Meguiar's as a writer, the above is simply the testimony of a satisfied customer. Anybody that knows me know I always tell people to use what they like. If they don't have a product or a system, then I am more than happy to show them what works for me. I did this before I went to work for Meguiar's and yes, I do it now that I do work for Meguiar's.

On my computer monitor I have a little saying taped on the top of my computer monitor that I read everyday before I begin thinking and typing, it says,

"A Professional Salesperson solves their customer's problem".

If you can solve somebody's problem, they sell themselves on your products. At least that's what I believe, I don't ever try to "sell" anyone, I just try to solve their problems, (paint polishing problems that is).

Take are all, I'm not sure when the next workshop will be, I hope soon, their fun to do, until then,

I have copy to write,

Mike Phillips

__________________
"Find a product you like and use it often"

Jack Anderson
Paint Instructor for PPG paints

Mike, I find it so very interesting that the way you and I work are, I don't know the word here, but, the only difference so far from your description, is that I down a diet coke or ice water. I find myself very tunnel vision orientated and don't like being disturbed other than perhaps the radio. Other people have a word for this, they think I'm a little anal.
I haven't heard any real difference in technique or anything else, but our chemical choices might be different, I don't know at this poiint. I definitely don't have anywhere near the experience as Mike and have never done any sanding.
I had no idea, but perhaps the answer in our similarity is due to fact this is the path that most of us eventually fall into or are steered towards, because some of us out there have tried all the other methods, techniques and products, and find this is the only way to do it. Other people who don't do it the way Mike and I do, is probably due to: 1.the extreme passion for this work is not there,
2. money driven, so quality suffers,
3. more than one person working on the same vehicle but without exactly the same passion.
So to conclude, I and everyone could learn alot from Mike. Just wish there was a way to cut down on the time and still retain the high standards.
Thanks Mike for your delightful story

I applied a bit of the info I learned from Mike. This weekend we had just enough rain to really mud up the road dust on the C230, so I gave it a wash. I was almost out of Final Inspection I normally use after washing, so earlier in the week I bought a gallon of the Meguiar's Final Detail industrial strength finishing spray. I did the hood with the final Inspection and it looked very nice, had a 'just waxed' slippery feeling, etc. I did the rest of the car with the Final Detail.

This stuff is just the cat's a$$!!!!! The whole car felt really slick and the gloss of the 1 month old wax really seemed to be enhanced more than what the Final Inspection did. I re-did 1/2 the hood with the Final Detail to do a side by side, and it was not imagination. Even with eyes closed you could feel the dividing line between the 2 products while lightly gliding a folded terry towel over the surface. Good stuff.

__________________
John

2003 Firemist Red/grey leather SL 500
2015 Palladium Silver/black mbtex GLK 350
1987 Smoke Silver/burgundy mbtex 300E Sportline (SOLD)

Click to see 87 300E

Yesterday I went to a professional detailing store that I found by doing a search on Meguiar's website, and spent about $130 on product.

I bought a gallon of the Final Detailing Spray, a gallon of the Engine Coat, 32 oz. bottles of #82 and #83, a bar of clay, one 8.5" foam finishing pad, one 8.5" foam detailing pad, one bottle of Extra all purpose cleaner (in the purple bottle), 4 empty spray bottles, and 2 "ketchup style" plastic bottles.

Boy, is my wife gonna kill me when she sees the credit card bill...

__________________
Paul S.

2001 E430, Bourdeaux Red, Oyster interior.
79,200 miles.

1973 280SE 4.5, 170,000 miles. 568 Signal Red, Black MB Tex. "The Red Baron".

After attending the detail clinic I'm planning to buy one of the Dewalt rotary buffers (Model DW849) with the adjustable electronic speed control that Mike used on our cars.

The MSRP is $360, Mike said it should run about $225, and I found it currently for sale on Amazon's tools and hardware page for $189.99 with free shipping.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00004RHIP/qid%3D1031539318/sr%3D11-1/ref%3Dsr%5F11%5F1/103-0231989-0839040

Does anyone know of a better price elsewhere?

I'll still have to buy the pads and bonnets and all the chemicals, so I need to find the best prices I can. Can anyone recommend a good paint supply shop that sells Meguiar's products at good prices? I'm near Pasadena, so anywhere within probably 40 miles would be OK.

Gary

Gary, Hi Power had Info on the Buffer please contact Ernesto,
On the Meguiars Products...Contact a Auto body shop Paint store They will have the goods! Good Luck

$189 is an incredibly good price on the De Walt.

Two years ago I paid $229 off of Harborfreight.com

The paint supply store that I purchased my Meguiar's products from is not too far from Pasadena.

It's called Meza Body Shop Supplies, 16300 Arrow Hwy, Irwindale, CA 91706. (626) 962-5857.

Take the 210 Fwy, exit at Vincent Ave, go South, turn right on Arrow Hwy, they're on your left hand side.

__________________
Paul S.

2001 E430, Bourdeaux Red, Oyster interior.
79,200 miles.

1973 280SE 4.5, 170,000 miles. 568 Signal Red, Black MB Tex. "The Red Baron".

I told you the Final Detail is absolutely amazing! I now use the Gold Class in combination with the Final Detail to create a deep and slick surface. And by the way, not only does the car look shinier, and feel slicker, it also makes it tons easier to remove any dirt/debris/bugs/tar from the finish on a regular basis.

I'm also planning on buying the rotary multipseed buffer with a few of the 6" Meguiars Pads. This will be in a few months after a have the chips on the car taken car of.

Paul,

Let me know how it goes with your wife, sounds like I'll be in the same predicament in a few months and any pointers would be appreciated!

__________________
Afshin

Current:
02 C32 AMG

Previous:
92 500E
84 190E 2.3 5 Spd

Afshin, I'd also get the 8.5" pads.

The 6" pads are awfully small, and they're great for small areas, but you'll appreciate having the size of the larger pad on broad flat surfaces, like your roof .

__________________
Paul S.

2001 E430, Bourdeaux Red, Oyster interior.
79,200 miles.

1973 280SE 4.5, 170,000 miles. 568 Signal Red, Black MB Tex. "The Red Baron".

Afshin I think mentioned, "The first technique that I've never seen before is how to pick up a polish line."

Could someone explain what this means?

Thanks!

__________________
Steve

1992 300CE Sportline Sophie
1990 300E Emma - in the family
1979 240D Josephine - sold, but not forgotten
2004 Pacifica AWD

http://web.mac.com/dakota/Mercedes/Home.html

If you used a rotary polisher before, you may have noticed that it's very easy to splatter polish everywhere.

Here's the trick:

You squirt a line of polish on the surface.

You turn on the polisher, and move the polisher over the polish at 10:00. If you do this, the buffing pad picks up the polish without slinging it all over your car, your clothes, and your garage.

Once the buffing pad has picked up the polish and smeared it around, then you go about your work, buffing it into the paint, as you slowly move the buffer over the paint.

__________________
Paul S.

2001 E430, Bourdeaux Red, Oyster interior.
79,200 miles.

1973 280SE 4.5, 170,000 miles. 568 Signal Red, Black MB Tex. "The Red Baron".

Thank you, Paul.

__________________
Steve

1992 300CE Sportline Sophie
1990 300E Emma - in the family
1979 240D Josephine - sold, but not forgotten
2004 Pacifica AWD

http://web.mac.com/dakota/Mercedes/Home.html