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I've had my car a couple of months now - the one thing that was bugging me was the bad paint condition. Being black it was always going to be difficult to keep swirl free, but it was as though the previous owners washed the car with a wire brush!
I had the option to get it professional detailed like my E92, but that was north of £700, so being a much smaller amount of seats and paintwork to fix, I decided to stop being lazy and get back in to detailing. Considering I had a lot of kit already, it made the process easier.
Some of the kit I used:-
- Nilfisk pressure washer with Nilfisk Alto Lance
- Carpro snow foam
- Two buckets with catcher (hand washed after snowfoam - with microfibre madness Incredimitt Wash Mitt)
- Dodo car shampoo for hand wash
- Valet pro brushes (small and long reach) for the wheels
- Autoglym active insect remover
- Meguiars all purpose cleaner
- Meguiars DA with Meguiars compound and finishing pads (borrowed, waiting for my new rupes 21 to arrive)
- Meguiars 105 aggressive compound and 205 finishing polish
- Dodo clay bar lube
- Clay bars (3 types)
- Meguiars endurance tyre gel
- Poorboys EX-P sealer (good for everything)
- Alu (french brand) exhaust cleaner
- Zaino leather treatment and UV protect
- BMW oem leather cleaner
- Dodo PH neutral alloy wheel cleaner
- Autoglym alloy wheel sealer
- 303 aerospace protectant (great product!)
- Rain-X glass
- Halfrauds cockpit spray
- Sonax window cleaner
- Lots of masking tape
- Handheld LED torch and floor standing LED lamp to check for swirls
Quite a list!
Started with the Autoglym insect remover, let it sit for a minute or two. Sprayed the alloy wheels with the Dodo PH neutral wheel cleaner. After the last wheel was coated I prepped the snow foam lance and began to soak the car. At this point it was 35c, so I wanted to get the car done as soon as possible, moving it into the garage to avoid the direct sun light. Unfortunately I didn't manage to do that, so the snowfoam started to bake on to the car. Cue much cursing and rinsing later...
The car was then hand washed with the mitt and 2 bucket using Dodo ph neutral shampoo. Rinced with the pressure washer and hose pipe. Have to be careful because the high pressure gets through the Z4 roof seals and you end up getting water inside.
After the manual wash the car was moved into the garage and dried off using a large blue microfibre which I bought a couple of years ago - the best investment to date!
As I was borrowing the Meguiars DA and it wasn't playing nicely with the pads (pads wern't stuck on properly) it made the work quite challenging and frustrating. I decided to work on the worst areas which were the bonnet, boot and top of the bumper. The rear wings are being done tonight and the rest when the new Rupes 21 orbital arrives.
A friend was helping me so we began work with the clay bar. Firstly working on the boot, which was surprisingly clean of tar and dirt, although covered in swirl marks.
This didn't take too long, so we decided to try the DA from the body shop. It is worth remembering to mask up all the panel gaps after the clay bar, catching any rubber/plastic bits. You don't want the DA making a mess of those, or all the white side effects of the polish falling down the gaps, makes a right mess! We used Meguiars 105 aggressive compound, starting at a low speed and moving up, followed by Meguiars 205 finishing polish. Checking using the LED lamps as we go ...
After that we added Poorboys EX-P sealer and finished with Meguiars gold class carnauba wax. The LED lamps showed 90% of the swirls were gone. We didn't want to cut back any further - we considered the final scratches could be mostly filled with wax. What I didn't want to do was take too much paint away in the process of perfection, 90% better is good enough for me, especially being "novices" and not pros working on cars all day every day.
My friend had to leave, so I repeated the process on the bonnet and the results are excellent. As it was getting late, decided to leave the rear qtr panels and roof for today, and crack on with the interior. The seats were cleaned with BMW oem leather cleaner, using the valet pro brushes to work in to the leather and stitching, then protected with Zaino leather sealer. All the glass was cleaned with Sonax which is excellent to avoid streaks. One thing I noticed, it's almost impossible to clean the Z4 rear glass! Unless you open the roof mechanism and stop it half way
All the plastics, rubber and hard surfaces of the roof and interior were protected with 303 aerospace, which has hundreds of 5* reviews on Amazon. It really does what it says on the tin. My new PSS tyres were protected with the Meguiars endurance tyre gel (great stuff!) and wheels sealed with the Autogym alloy wheel sealer.
It was a 12 hour day and I'm only three quarters of the way through - it's already 37c here, so the rest will wait for tonight! Fantastic results so far - will post some fully finished photos in the sun later today or tomorrow - for now, some evenings shots from the garage
The plan will be to add Carpro nano protection (ceramic based) rather than the wax, as it will last considerably longer. That is for next month when things cool off a bit!
It was difficult to capture the mess that was.. but this was just one area which was not so bad
And afterwards
But there were other more serious considerations, such as ability to have it looked after over here, etc ...
