Car Detailing

[Richard135i]

Hiya Fellow 1er's.

Heidi (my 135i) turned 1 on this past weekend so I have been looking into giving her the full works detailing.

I've done a little research as never waxed a car before and found some handy products but the one that still
leaves me scratching my head to locate in Australia is the Bosch GEX 150 Turbo.

If any of you Melburians know where to get this it would be much appreciated.

Heidi has only clocked 5000klms in her first year so it's not lack of love this will be her first full detail.

Thanks in advance

[WOPALX]

Not necessarily that brand but Mike and his team have awesome products and give great advise;

http://www.carcareproducts.com.au/

[Dec540]

If you've never polished or waxed your car before then stick with a Random Orbital buffer. The other option is a Rotary. The difference is the random orbital moves in different directions where as the rotary spins round and round.

Rotary's are great if you know what your doing because they heat up the clear coat much quicker and you can do serious paint correction with them. If you don't know what your doing you can burn your clear coat and quite easily put deep scratches in your paint which isn't cool.

A RO will be more than enough if you just have light swirls and nothing really serious which i don't imagine you would after 5 months unless you washed your car with bricks. You can't really damage your paintwork with an RO unless you really try Watch a few videos on buffing first, there isn't much to it.

Mike from CCP is a great guy and will basically tell your the same thing, as i'm just regurgitating what he told me when i first started detailing my car

[sparoz]

Concur with others - ccp is great. If you can stretch to a Flex - that would be the better option as it is a RO but have some guts behind it so it can do some correction. It's used by Merc for their finish polish. Otherwise, Festool has got great feedback, Bosch should be available from bunnings but from what I gathered, festool is the better product. Both the festool and the bosch are actually sanders, while the flex is a dedicated polisher.

My 2 cents is either get a cheapo RO, ie GMC or go for the Flex as you will ever only need to buy one. Unless, you start to be really fancy and start to learn to use a rotary - which gives the best result but can cause swirls and holograms and burnt through if you don't know how to use it properly.

excuse my coherence.. it is getting late.

[Richard135i]

Thanks guys for the great advice, I think I will get the Festool RO and watch some videos as you guys have indicated. Heidi doesn't have many swirls as I do a waterfree car wash, but she has been washed twice at Bib Stillwell which hasn't helped plus I got some bizarre marks on her rump from somewhere. Thanks again.

[WOPALX]

I thought I would attach CCP's detailing checklist / flow chart that we printed for them recently. Good as a point of reference & I'm sure Mike won't mind me sharing it.