Even though our car is relatively new it's begun to pick up some unsightly blemishes such as swirl marks, rock dings, etc... In an effort to eliminate these problems marring the paint I decided to give Meguiar's Ultimate Compound a shot as it's aggressive enough to deal with all these problems to an extent, but advertised as not aggressive enough to really worry about from a non-professional detailer perspective. As a test, I decided to concentrate on the hood where the most noticable defects were (although I've got some really visible ones on the roof I'm going to tackle next).
I started off by giving the a car a good wash and then clay barred it to remove the tree sap and some other things that were embedded in the paint. From there, I went after the really problem areas by hand using Meguiar's Ultimate Compound (hereafter shortened to "MUC") and a microfiber round sponge. On the lip of the car between the hood and the top portion of the grille there were a few rock dings where the impact had basically caused the paint to displace towards the back of the car; think of it like pushing a spoon across the surface of a frosted cake, the frosting isn't gone it just gets pushed in the direction you're moving the spoon. By working in the reverse direction using the sponge and the MUC (i.e. back to front) I was able to really help somewhat reverse the damage done by the rock. It's certainly not "fixed" as you can still see the ding but it doesn't appear to be as bad. The same applies to a much more noticable scrape on the lip, it's not fixed but looks much better now. From there, I decided to use an orbital buffer to go after a fairly noticable surface scratch going from the lip of the car diagonally towards the windshield. I'm not really sure what caused the scratch and it wasn't really that terrible, but it was fairly noticable in direct sunlight. A few passes with the oribal buffer and MUC and the scratch is gone, completely.
During all of this I got so into the whole process that I ended up using the orbital buffer and MUC on the entire hood. Let me tell you, the hood came out as flawless as you can probably get using consumer-grade equipment (my orbital is a Mastercraft from Canadian Tire using cheap microfiber pads, not a fancy Porter Cable with Lake Country pads). I think I've gotten pretty decent at detailing over the last year but this was by far the best job I've done yet. I think I did a total of 4-5 passes on the entire hood and wiped off between each pass to make sure I wasn't doing anything bad to the finish since I've never used MUC before. At no time in this process did the MUC ever leave so much as a swirl in the finish of the paint so anyone worried about MUC being too aggressive should be assured you'd likely have to really go at your paint with this stuff to do any kind of damage. I finished the job with a coat of Meguiar's NXT (original, not 2.0 as I haven't run out of original yet, these bottles last a long time) and topped that off with Meguiar's Gold Class paste wax (this is a new thing I started doing after reading about it, the carnuba on top of the synthetic wax really brings the shine up a notch). Attached are some photos of the results and I think they speak for themselves. Our car has metallic flake paint yet the shine is so deep that, even close up, you can see reflections of objects clearly.
I started off by giving the a car a good wash and then clay barred it to remove the tree sap and some other things that were embedded in the paint. From there, I went after the really problem areas by hand using Meguiar's Ultimate Compound (hereafter shortened to "MUC") and a microfiber round sponge. On the lip of the car between the hood and the top portion of the grille there were a few rock dings where the impact had basically caused the paint to displace towards the back of the car; think of it like pushing a spoon across the surface of a frosted cake, the frosting isn't gone it just gets pushed in the direction you're moving the spoon. By working in the reverse direction using the sponge and the MUC (i.e. back to front) I was able to really help somewhat reverse the damage done by the rock. It's certainly not "fixed" as you can still see the ding but it doesn't appear to be as bad. The same applies to a much more noticable scrape on the lip, it's not fixed but looks much better now. From there, I decided to use an orbital buffer to go after a fairly noticable surface scratch going from the lip of the car diagonally towards the windshield. I'm not really sure what caused the scratch and it wasn't really that terrible, but it was fairly noticable in direct sunlight. A few passes with the oribal buffer and MUC and the scratch is gone, completely.
During all of this I got so into the whole process that I ended up using the orbital buffer and MUC on the entire hood. Let me tell you, the hood came out as flawless as you can probably get using consumer-grade equipment (my orbital is a Mastercraft from Canadian Tire using cheap microfiber pads, not a fancy Porter Cable with Lake Country pads). I think I've gotten pretty decent at detailing over the last year but this was by far the best job I've done yet. I think I did a total of 4-5 passes on the entire hood and wiped off between each pass to make sure I wasn't doing anything bad to the finish since I've never used MUC before. At no time in this process did the MUC ever leave so much as a swirl in the finish of the paint so anyone worried about MUC being too aggressive should be assured you'd likely have to really go at your paint with this stuff to do any kind of damage. I finished the job with a coat of Meguiar's NXT (original, not 2.0 as I haven't run out of original yet, these bottles last a long time) and topped that off with Meguiar's Gold Class paste wax (this is a new thing I started doing after reading about it, the carnuba on top of the synthetic wax really brings the shine up a notch). Attached are some photos of the results and I think they speak for themselves. Our car has metallic flake paint yet the shine is so deep that, even close up, you can see reflections of objects clearly.
