| Re: clear bra :)
That 3M "Dark Paint swirl remover" is pretty good stuff - used to use it on my black C5. But even though it says it's a "polish" it was still just filling in the swirls like a wax, it's NOT fixing the scratches like Griotts or another true polish. It looks good, but it's not a permanent solution and won't help Ice because he'll have everything removed from the areas where the clear bra is going, which will re-expose the swirls.
I've used Griotts too, and while it works well on some paints (like the C5) it also didn't work very well on my ex-wive's black Tahoe. I guess maybe some paints are just softer than others, so what works well on one car might not work as well on another car. When I used Griotts 3 on my C5 it smoothed out the halos nicely, but on the tahoe it *created* more super-fine swirl marks and made the paint almost cloudy. In retrospect it was probably user error because I should have started at the finest polish first, but I was just doing what I always did and going 2-3 like I did on the C5. Surface prep was the same too - basically I just wash the car with Dawn before doing any polishing to make sure everything is off the car (wax, polish, etc).
I'll have to try some new waxes - I've been a Zaino user since I had a Mystic Cobra back in 1996, and it was the only wax at the time that would make the color change really obvious. ("Mystic" was a Ford factory flip-flop paint that went from green to purple to rootbeer depending on the angle you were looking at the paint). I've tried tons of different waxes since then, but haven't found anything that looks deeper than Zaino, but Zaino doesn't seem to last very long...
-B |