The car in question is a Volvo V50 and is barely one year old with less than 18000 miles on the clock. It is one of two company cars and that has been subject to a showering of shot blast particles that has come from their shot blast machine. Not intentionally I may add but the company has been in denial that it was anything to do with them. It went to Volvo for some service items recently and to say they were not too pleased with the state of it would be putting it politely. Anyway, I have been offering to clean it for a long time and eventually they took me up on it.
You can see here the metal particles have bonded themselves to the surface. Imagine how a rough sand paper feels on your hand and you would be getting close to how the paintwork felt. It was even in the door shuts!
The following picture shows the benefit of a clay treatment. The bonnet has not been clayed. The water doesn’t run off the paintwork and the contaminants steal the gloss. The wing has been clayed and allows the gloss to shine through.
50/50 shot of the rear bumper.
A brand new piece of clay.
What it looked like after only a very small piece of metal. I have clayed loads of cars but this was extreme.
After claying and yet another wash. The metal particles had eaten into the lacquer, so I decided to break out the DA, with a yellow pad and some fast gloss which safely removed the remaining contaminants and gave a really good mirror finish. Finally a wipe over with some Megs Last Touch to remove any dust created from the DA and to add a little protection.
Inside was given a good hoover, along with all plastics cleaned. It certainly smelt a lot better afterwards. All in all 11.5 hours of hard graft but what a difference.