My 50 Hours Restoration On A Bnr32

[cobrAA]

And now a more uniform look:


Work in progress: you can clearly see where theres still some orange peel to be removed and where the paint is flat and even:


Wet-sanding can be EXTREMELY MESSY! Here's one reason why a full wet-sanding is a minimum 15-20 hours. so much time needed to clean your mess after:

here I'm about to knock the orange peel on this door:






Here's a true work in progress,, it reminds me of the inside of a tree, where you can see the different layer of wood depending on its age. gradually you can see the orange peel beeing ''flatten'' and offering an uniform matte look to the paint:

These are the dust particle that gave me so much troubles on this car:


The painter was too generous with his clear coat ; putting too much clear coat can have a CONS.. it takes much longer to dry and thus it's harder for the detailer to cut throught the clear coat. As you can see, although i'm using a machine to offer an uniform sanding, i still ended up with lots of uneven spot:

After a third pass of finer grit, you can see the clear reflection coming back.. all it needs is a few compounding pass with a foam pad and we will have a perfect panel!

[cobrAA]

Booooom !! Told ya! Look at this reflection and gloss, no final polish or wax or nano-coating applied, just compounding with still slight hologram and buffer trail.

But it's still ultra messy:



After getting the car back from the bodyshop ( it stayed there 2 weeks + 2 month at the other useless bodyshop in 2013) + mechanic work .. the interior was very very dusty.. so we took the opportunities to deeply clean the interior using the best machine and technique possible:

Steamer machine
Industrial drying tool ( for faster curing and quicker application)
Hot water professional extractor machine
Ton loads of different chemicals ( raceglaze alcantara cleaner and anti-bacteria cleaner, meguiars fiber cleaner to name a few)
Cquartz Fabric and UV protection
Aquapel fog fight
Cquartz Finest for all plastic screen, metal pedal and door sill

Dusty interior with some stain on the seat:

Professionnal extractor at work!



Cquartz ozone treatment to help kill bacteria that cause bad odor:

[cobrAA]

It's all in the detail right ?? these gauges are brand new, yet they are still scratched due to cheap soft plastic screen.. I needed to polish all screen by hand using a menzerna polish and soft gold microfiber and cleaned the surface with carpro erase prior to the Finest nano-coating application which should help to reduce the chance of new swirls to be found. ( nano coating will harden the surface of which it is applied making it harder to scratch)

I even did the remote lol:

and nano-coated the pedal

Look at the final result:

Using the new carpro q-tip for cleaning interior vent:


Look at all the dirt, my extractor pulled!


Once the seat have been wetted by the extractor, i dry the interior using my dryer machine, once almost dry, i spray some ozone treatment like show previously.. and then when completely dry.. i will apply carpro fabric protection which in my testing prove to be better than 3m sctochguard! It also over UV protection which is perfect for this vehicle since the fabric of the seat can discolor over time due to UV rays abuse.

Okay let's look later on how the interior will look like once the new carpet and carbon fiber door sill get installed:

Of course the carbon fiber door sill were polished and nano-coated!

Now onto the engine-bay... quite a few works have been done there + all the polishing dust and wet-sanding, that engine bay was in done of a refresh:

[cobrAA]

With some high-speed driving and hard braking.. it's normal to see that much brake dust on this car:



Althought the paint is brand new, I still did a clay bar and decontamination process because of iron particle from the brake that could stick to the still-not-cured-100% paint.

Regarding the wheels, each one were individually removed for a full nano-coating treat! All wheels were washed a first time using sonax wheel cleaner, then I used Prima cosmonot to remove any grease inside the wheel barell, after that i went with autofinesse tar remover to remove old glue from wheel weight not used anymore. Once cleaned, I used Menzerna polish by hand for tight area and my small rupes 3 inch to polish the spoke and inside barell. Once done, I used carpro erase to remove polishing oils and then applied 2 layer of nano coating inside and outside.



I would say i took about 1 hours per wheel.

Here's another exemple of wet-sanding the pillar.

We start with a coarse grit:


Taking some paint measure just to monitories how much paint I'm removing but since the paint is a bit inconsistent, it's hard to keep track of it so I kinda forgot my effort at keeping track of it.

See, the reflection is MUCH BETTER now, yet still only wet-sanding happening. This is after meguiars #3000 grit disc.

Tool of predilection for working in tight spot:

TADAM! once polished.. nothing to report, just an ultra-clean paint with no orange peel and whatsoever

Yeah buddy!!!

Now we're approaching the final step.. Basicly the whole care have been polished and obviously wet-sanded ( except for the front bumper and grill), and I'm at the point of inspecting my work and work panel by panel if defect is present.. and obsviouly some defect were present ( I mean, we are all humans, it's hard to expect such an exhaustive project ( +80 hours) to go without one single ''trouble'', but this... who cares if it will be corrected before delivering the car? )

What I do is pick up 3 different light gun ( halogen, sungun and LED) and turn around he car, every time I see something i put a small tape:



I was mostly looking at sanding mark not corrected or small pigtail due to all the dust particle stuck on the paint.

look closely under the light spot, you will notice a half circular mark, that's a pigtail:



Later on.. I found this kind of orange peel on the pillar.. I first didn't want to go too crazy around the trim because they were very fragile and trims didn't get removed of the car prior to painting so last thing I want is burn the paint there.. but at the same time it was way too obvious of orange peel to let it like that. see by yourself?

[cobrAA]

See the white faded paint. this is what i had to polish by hand using these products:

I also had to wet-sand the inside of the mirror because the grain was too present to be ignored. it's actually quite complicated to polish this area because wet-sanding is easy, but removing sanding mark by hands is a whole different story.. i believe i spent 1 hour per mirror just to polish /sand 30% of the mirror.



This is how far the machine could go.. i had to do the rest by hand :



In the whole process, the car didn't stay 2 weeks in the shop, so on a week-end, the following monday, the car came with a vandalism mark, yeah someone scuffed the paint in the pillar quite badly.

I started by putting some touch-up paint:



I then carefully wet-sanded and polished the area and I must say i was quite happy with the end result!

Just suck that people have absolutely no respect for clean and unique car like this one. This really piss me off.

The wiper were in bad shape with paint peeling so I decided to paint them overnight.

Remember the gap found on 50% of the sideskirt/splat and other after-market fiberglass add-on ? Well.. it was time to screw them to the panel and have a little of urethane to seal the gap.

The windows were clean, but still 25 yr old... so I took the time to polish them using my air-powered rupes tool ( the GG 3 inch is not powerful enough), carpro ceramiglass and GG windows pad. ( the smallest the better for better accuracy around the edge)

The worst part was one rear quarter windows which had tons of deep scratches, i bet it someone who went to DRAG, had his number there and removed with a razor metal blade that scratched the glass. I would say i was able to remove most of the haziness found in the glass and reduce the scratches by about 30-40% which is still better than nothing!! If you ask your local detailer, chances are he will tells you there's nothing that can be done, so 30-40% correction is better than nothing at all!

After that, I used Aquapel on all windows for a great protection and awesome water repellency

[cobrAA]

Once everything was done, i could finally nano-coat all the brand new trims to protect them the best I could and offered a deep satin shine to them.



Engine bay got a clean up too and every metal was polished to obtain a better look:

Here we are: car is ALMOST done and I'm here applying one of the best nano-coating on the market, exclusive to a few detailer, Cquartz Finest provide an awesome gloss while offering excellent protection against scratch and swirls.

I still have minor this and that to fix on the car ( interior/exterior/engine bay all together),most likely everything will be done in one full day.. it just take a bit more times to finish. ( i.e: drilling the side skirt, installing new reflective sticker and new DRL rear light, last bit of shine in the engine bay)

Oh yeah, the owner also had to re-install his front and rear diffuser since the bodyshop removed them to paint all part more easily and since the front bumper was new, new hole had to be drilled to hold the front diffuser. All carbon parts have been polished and nano-coated with finest prior to installation:


Here some after-shot.. a full high quality photoshoot will happens shortly!!

[cobrAA]

Some more after-pic the next day after letting the coating cure overnight:

[cobrAA]

Isn't that UBER MEGA gorgeous ?? damnnnnn

Some shot of the interior with carbon fiber door sill, new carpet and new nismo plate:

[GodziRRa]

On 10/26/2014 at 5:43 AM, cobrAA said:

part 2 is here!!

Part 2 :

Shoot out to The painter, Alex, at Promec in Laval ((450) 629-7077), for taking care of the car like it was meant to be! He sent me some picture of the progress so let's take a look at them.

The skyline GTR R32 is an iconic car and the owner wished to keep it OEM looking with small addition for a meaner look ( i.e: carbon fiber addon). For this reason, Alex had the job to restore the car as new as possible.

Trims: restoring trims is a real PITA because the car is now seen as a collection car and parts in Japan are now selling twice as much.. To change all the trims and seal on the car, it would've of cost min. 1500$ + 2 quarter windows ( which can usually go for 300-500$ each). So, Alex did a miracle by cleaning the trim, lightly sand them and paint them with a special trim black paint. I was very pleasant with what he did. Basically he saved the owner a 1500-2000$ expense. They look VERY GOOD.


1) Remember part 1 where I said the bodyshop did a shimming job instead of a actual frame job ? well.. the gab between the headlight and corner like was like that ''V'' . The guy at promec knew a retired guy (about 70yr old) who have all the frame tools in his garage.. they brought the car there and they finally managed to do the job it deserved!

Old post but very nice work!! Have to bring this up for future reference though. This issue on the smoked indicators might not be because of alignment. This aftermarket indicators (colin I think) are known to have minor fitting issue, especially the L side. Need to drill or adjust mounting hole to make them fit flush properly. You guys should've tested an OEM indicators first before adjusting. If you set the body alignment based on this aftermarket, then I'm afraid the work is misalignment now. 

Edited March 6, 2017 by GodziRRa