I have always loved the older cars and particularly the W202 series Mercedes, as I am sure most of my loyal customers know seeing what I usually turn up to jobs in. I was delighted when this car ended up in my garage for an intensive detail, or as intensive as 1 day could get. Firsts step is lets assess what we have
Exterior wise the car has fading all over which is giving it quite a dull look, the wheels are carrying about 23 years worth of baked on iron and brake dust and as I can safely confirm, have never been decontaminated. The rear window is suffering from the sun damaged tint that has been attempted to be removed at some stage. The worse is to come though, the car has paint splatter the whole length of the side which is baked into the quarter panel, doors and rear quarter panel quite well.
So already the exterior is going to need an intensive amount of work, white is very forgiving when scratched and dirty and this car was hiding a lot of surprises for me.
The interior was caked in filth, the seats where almost black stained, the dash was stained white and the doors where in dire need of a good scrub.
Needless to say, the interior had seen better days and the temptation to get a nice new set of seat covers was growing, but frankly I love a challenge and this job was completely in my ball park of enjoyment.
To start with, the car was given a very in depth vacuum and then a very long dash and trim scrub. I worked my brushes overtime to get all the white off the dash and restore the trim to as good as new, or as good as could be. The seats where in dire need of some serious love so once I was happy with the trim and doors, I hit these with my best Duragloss strong leather cleaner once, twice...... five times and a leather brush then coated them in Duragloss leather protectant which restores the leathers natural oils and brings back the beautiful rich leather smell. After the seats were complete, using Autosmart brisk which is designed to kill bacteria and restore carpet fibers, the carpets were given a very good shampoo extraction.
I was quite happy with how the interior turned out for a 23 year old car that was in dire of a good detail. Some spots were bought back to a best case situation and others came back perfect.
The exterior was then treated to a snow foam to loosen all dirt that was clung on and then a 2 bucket wash and the wheels were taken off and cleaned in depth. See the next picture to see some of the iron fallout results, the chemical turns red when it reacts with any iron or debris lodged into the paint work that would constitute a contamination.
As can be noted, the car most likely had never had an intensive decontamination in over 20 years. The car was then clay barred and that was when the penny dropped on the severity of the dried in paint, I attempted all my arsenal of chemicals including thinners before it became inevitable that I only had one route available and that was to wet sand, so the whole left side of the car was given a wet sand from 1000 grit up to 6000 grit then a overlap of Menzerna 400.
This was the scene of the paint explosion before and below is after
Unfortunately the 2 scratches were two deep and will require touch up at a further stage. I then went over the whole car with a microfiber cutting pad on a dual action polisher using Menzerna 400 then Menzerna finish and seal to protect the paint.
The car can now be seen has having all the dull paint fading removed and the paint restored to show the beautiful glossy shine from the 23 year old paint. Is it a show car, no, but this car has a beautiful history and it is great to bring it back to life to be enjoyed for the next 23 years, though lets hope it is detailed before then.