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| Roadfly Official Time: Nov 8, 2009 7:23am EST |
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I'm a newbie to detailing and obviously I should leave professional compounds like Zaino to the pros. I read EVERYTHING about using Zaino polishes and thought I'd done all the right things, but I still ended up with badly smeared car. My 1998 Jaguar XJ8 is one of the worst colors for detailing: "anthracite" -- which is ultra-dark gray metallic, one shade away from black, with very deep metallic undertones. As you can imagine, when the car is clean it's gorgeous. When I bought the car in February it had been through the usual car wash torture treatment, and as a result the paint was covered in swirl marks. I put on a hold-over coat of Rain-X car polish to get me through the rest of the winter, but the weather was so nice this weekend I couldn't resist using some of the Zaino products I had bought. As I say, I read EVERYTHING about using the stuff properly. - I washed the car twice to make sure it was super clean, and dried it with a big new terry cloth. - My plan was to apply two coats of Z5, so I opened my package of ZFX Flash Cure Accelerator Overdrive (or "$10 per milliliter Snake Oil" for short) and carefully added 4 drops of the stuff to a little over an ounce of Z5. - After shaking the hell out of the mixture for a couple of minutes I applied it in dime-sized dabs in the manner described in the docs. In retrospect I now realize that even though I was putting the stuff on as thinly as I could, it was applied a bit too thick. An hour later, after drying (supposedly!), there was a VERY light white haze on much of the car. This is normal for most waxes and polishes, but I understand the haze indicates that Zaino has been applied too thickly. I gave the stuff a good 90 minutes to dry on a sunny, arid morning, parked in the shade with a nice breeze. To make the time go faster I cleaned all the glass and the wheels. I took a fresh new terry cloth in hand and gently ran it across the hood, the first part of the car I'd applied Zaino to. There was just a hint of haze on this part of the car. When I gently buffed it, to my horror I was greeted not by shine, but by a horrific smear. I couldn't believe it! Back to the instructions I went, and they said to wait longer. I did, another hour (I thought the Snake Oil was supposed to eliminate the wait?), and only when I could run a finger across the car and see no smearing did I try again. Same result. While a few parts of the car same up shiny right away (though not even slightly less swirl-marked than before), most of the car turned out to be a long, slow struggle to buff. I went through a half-dozen terry cloths over the next 90 minutes, carefully and gently buffing until the smears were cleared from most of the car. Close inspection, however, showed much smearing still there, along with all the original swirl marks and other marks that looked like water spots. These were probably old markings I hadn't noticed before. I could swear the car has about four layers of crap over the paint. All that was yesterday. This morning I ran my finger across a shiny portion of the trunk lid, and to my horror a long streak followed. I could NOT bufff that streak out! It's like the whole car is covered in a thin layer of slime that shows clear once in a while, depending on how the light hits it. So here's my question to the board: How do I get this stuff OFF MY CAR? Is there some sort of stripping agent that will effectively let me start over? Or will a couple of washes with Dawn suffice. In closing, yes, I applied too much of the stuff. No need to tell me that! I just need to know how to get if off. Thanks in advance! John Mulvihill, technical writer, San Francisco Bay Area 1998 XJ8, Anthracite/Charcoal | ||||
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