ARCHIVES

This video shows the results of a Correction Detail performed on a 2005 Porsche 911 (996) GT3 Club Sport in our studio in Kintore. The total work time was 40 hours and the car was finished with Swissvax Crystal Rock. We hadn’t originally planned to share this video, as it was only made to learn new editing methods in readiness for features we plan to produce next year (it was created entirely from still images taken with a Canon 60D DSLR; all of the pans and zooms were created digitally in Adobe Premiere Pro). However, we were so delighted with the end result that we decided to share it!

Lately, we’ve been receiving a very healthy amount of monthly show and shine entries, and more questions than ever before have been asked about how we judge the competition and pick the winners. These questions have ranged from the pre-emptive “What do I need to do to win?” to the cheeky “I didn’t win last month: why not?”, and have raised some interesting points. As a result, we’ve decided to spill the beans and tell you exactly what you need to do to win. This should save you a bit of time and misdirected effort in future.

To kick things off, let’s recap the rules… “The rules for entering our monthly show and shine competition are simple. Firstly, buy some products from us and keep a note of the order number. Then use the products and take decent quality photos of the results. Finally submit at least eight photos to our usual e-mail address, along with the original order number and a written summary of what you did. At the end of each month we will judge that month’s entries and the winner will be featured here and will receive £150 worth of products from the store. Good luck!”.

So far, I’ve blogged on washing, decontamination and polishing, so this article is, with just a hint of predictability, going to focus on paint protection and last stage products (or LSPs for short).

When deciding which LSP to select, due to the chiefly subjective nature of the subject, I think it’s best to consider which properties in a finish are of highest importance. Some products will maximise flake pop, others reflectivity, some the depth of shine and colour richness (also known as jetting). Obviously factors such as durability are objective and will play a more easily quantifiable part in the process. If you know what you’re looking for in a finish, it makes product selection much easier – remembering that, at the moment, there is no truly perfect LSP.

In the third installment of my blog, I’ll look at my training regarding polishing and offer my thoughts on this massive topic. This could be lengthy…

The initial points that Rich and I discussed were basic, but possibly much overlooked: what exactly is car paint and, crucially, how much paint depth do cars typically have? I was aware that total depth is usually pretty thin, but only when you have a laboratory reference shim in your hand do you realise that 100 microns is not a lot. For reference, a typical sheet of paper is around 70 microns thick.

Paint defects generally comprise any damage that has broken the top layer of paint (usually termed the clearcoat) and damage such as stone chips and swirl marks are probably the most common. For the purposes of this blog, I’ll refer to any abrasive product as a polish and any non-abrasive product as a glaze in the following discussion.

We don’t usually pay much attention to the anniversary of the date we first started trading (9th January 2006), but this year it feels like more of a milestone worth celebrating. Although estimates vary, evidence suggests that less than half of new businesses survive for five years or more. Given that half a decade after our launch we are still growing strongly and weathering the wider economic woes reasonably well, we feel very proud of Polished Bliss in terms of the brand we have established, the team we have put together and what we have achieved to date.

When we first launched Polished Bliss, interest in the concept of detailing was gaining substantial momentum. Sure, the concept of high quality car care wasn’t exactly new and there were already numerous established traders in the marketplace, but nobody had thought to combine the sale of products with the provision of services… or to focus on offering free expert advice too. This was a brand new business model for car care in the UK, and to this day still underpins what the Polished Bliss brand stands for in the marketplace.

Moving on from my previous post about safe washing, the next natural step in the detailing process is decontamination, which is a somewhat narrower topic but one that is often misunderstood. Prior to discussing decontamination with Rich I had an understanding of what decontamination does and how to do it, but didn’t know how it actually works…

To be honest, I was a little worried about being blinded by science when Rich started talking about organic and inorganic particles, electrolysis, charges and so on; he’s got a PHD in hydrochemistry whereas I scraped my way to a Standard Grade in Chemistry! However, I needn’t have worried as the basic principles are just that – basic.

After washing your car, there is every chance that the paint will still be contaminated with particles which can’t be removed by shampoo alone and these fall into two categories: organic (carbon-based and generally more ‘natural’ like honeydew and pollen) and inorganic (sometimes still carbon-based but in a highly processed form, or everything else that doesn’t fall into the organic category).

A very warm welcome from all of us to John Sorrie, who recently joined the PB team in a sales and marketing role. John is currently being intensively trained in all aspects of car care and detailing, and as part of this process we thought it would be nice for him to share his thoughts and contribute some diary entries to the blog. Without further ado we’ll hand over to John…

“As the newest addition to the Polished Bliss team, it’s fair to say I’m on the bottom edge of a rather steep learning curve and one which seems to have a particularly high summit. Over the coming weeks, as I ascend this mountain, I’ll update the blog with my progress, thoughts and discoveries. I should point out at this stage that I’m not a detailer, more an ‘enthusiastic amateur’, so I’m fully aware that I have a lot to learn. The first stage of my training has focused on the wash process; pre-wash rinsing, pre-wash foaming, hand washing, post-wash rinsing, wheel cleaning and drying.

Rich and I agreed that pre-wash rinsing is often not done properly. The basic principle of the pre-wash rinse is to remove the maximum amount of dirt and grime possible before starting the wash process proper. Like all parts of detailing, the wash process should be systematic, working top-down and ‘chasing’ as much dirt, and therefore dirty water, off the car as possible – it’s not just about wetting the paint and Rich and I both felt that anything less than ten minutes of rinsing, assuming the use of a power washer, was insufficient. You only have to look at the image at the top of this post to see why thorough pre-wash rinsing is so important! Pre-wash foaming, whilst it has its critics or ‘non-believers’, is a useful process and one which can remove yet more dirt before contact is made with the paint.

Last month we were visited by Tim Wallace from Ambient Life Photography, who spent two days with us shooting two Porsche 911 Turbos belonging to two of our customers. This was the highlight of our year so far, and an event we had been looking forward to for a long time. In order to make the shoot as interesting as possible, we tried to incorporate several themes into the imagery. For starters, we chose two iconic models; the air-cooled 993 Turbo, in this case fitted with the extremely rare X50 factory upgrade, and the current water-cooled 997 Turbo. Secondly, we opted to contrast light against dark by choosing a Basalt Black 997 as the second car (the Arctic Silver 993 was the primary car chosen before the details of the shoot were finalised). Thirdly, we decided to shoot on location as well as in our studio, in order to capture some interesting textures and landscapes in the shots. Finally, we chose to shoot out on the open road too, in order to try something new – as far as we know nobody else in the UK has shown off detailing results in such a dynamic way before.

Another month, another Ne Plus Ultra detail. Bookings for our flagship detailing service have been growing steadily since its launch back in 2008, and this year we are very pleased to have completed two 150+ hour details already. This time round it was the turn of a four year old solid black Bentley Arnage to receive the Ne Plus Ultra treatment, and it soon proved to be our most testing challenge yet, requiring over 104 hours of paint correction work alone. As per usual, the entire process was photographed and recorded in HD, and at some point in the next couple of months when the spring rush is over we will produce another HD video feature for the blog. However, in the meantime we thought this would be a good opportunity to briefly show off another side of the Ne Plus Ultra service; studio photography.

January is usually a slow and steady month at Polished Bliss, but this was not the case this year due to the exceptional amount of snow that fell early in the month. Not only did the snow disrupt order dispatch for over a week, but several customers were also unable to bring their cars into us for detailing services to be performed. This necessitated some painful reorganisation of our diary, but fortunately we were still able to squeeze in the Ferrari 355 F1 Berlinetta shown in the video below. Just over ten years old with 22k on the clock and mechanically excellent, the only thing letting the car down was the state of the bodywork, which showed all of the classic signs of many years of improper washing and maintenance. Ferrari paint is usually quite soft on pre-2005 cars, so we originally allocated four days to complete a major paint correction detail. However, early on in the detail it became apparent that front and rear end cosmetic resprays had left a rock hard finish that was going to require substantially more work if a near perfect result was going to be achieved. In light of this, the detail was upgraded to full Ne Plus Ultra status and ultimately more than 112 hours were spent restoring the bodywork to near perfect condition.