[Exterior - Machine] Opel Astra Coupe Bertone - Second Youth

Welcome
At the beginning I apologize for not writing in French, but unfortunately have not yet learned the language too much. I can read a little, but the writing and speaking is a different story. If this is a problem let me know, I will not publish any more relations.

I spent the first weekend in June with a beautiful Opel Astra Coupe Bertone from 2001. The car was thoroughly cleaned, the paint has been corrected and polished and at the end all external elements was coated with products that improve water repellency. The car was not in the best condition as shown in the following images.










Saturday, I started from exact the car wash. The whole process took me an absurd amount of time mainly because of the wheels, which probably never been properly cleaned I used the strongest products that I have and a whole arsenal of different brushes and cloths. After the wheels the car was sprayed with an "active" foam (also the strongest that I have) to soften as much as possible the old dirt, insects and tar. The next steps were: clean the various nooks and crannies, proper wash with two buckets technique, the fight with black dots and get rid of the metal "dirt". The final step was claying which mean removing the dirt from the body and wheels that remained after the earlier stages. This time I used a product called "ClayBlock Professional" from Chemical Guys which worked very comfortable, but you have to be careful with it - it is a very aggressive product and IMO not suitable for cleaning cars that will not go to the step of paint correction. At the end of the car was very carefully dried and was ready for inspection of the paint.















Paint on the Astra was in a very, very bad shape. I had very little time (it was already 16:00 on Saturday), so that I decided to use a two-stage paint correction and protection from Meguiar's called DA Microfiber Correction System in conjunction with a Dual Action machine (DAS-6 PRO). I also wanted to remove or minimize some of the deeper scratches, especially those on the left side of the car. For this work I used water paper 2000 and 3000 as well as my most aggressive kit for paint correction - Menzerna polishes, wool pad, a set of hard foam pads and a small rotary polisher. I removed about 70% of the largest scratches and I might more but not having a paint thickness gauge I preferred not to risk it because the mistake would end in mandatory painting At the end of have been polished (using the above aggressive set) all wheels. The whole process took me about 11 hours.














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After the paint correction the entire car was thoroughly rinsed from remnants of polishing pastes and drying, it was time for wax (applied with a machine - the second step of the above-mentioned system Meguiar's), accurate washing and polishing windows, lights, chrome ornaments and protection for all plastic and rubber parts. Unfortunately, I ran out of time to polish the exhaust pipe The final result shows photos and short video below.






















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So comprehensive work on the car I did the first time in my life (a machine I used a second time - first time I only placed EZ Creme Glaze on the Honda Jazz), and of course I made a variety of mistakes. For example: I unnecessarily used touch-up paint on large scratches - it came horribly and then I had to rip off everything; I used a little too much polishing compound and wax on pads - I corrected this error after two or three panels.

Best regards
Piotr

PS. I have two short videos showing the work on the car.

VIDEOS

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