shane@detailedreflections

Does it feel dull? My guess is you did strike through the clear. Wet sanding and multiple steps of compound and polish can take off clear coat in a hurry. We sometimes forget that no paint job is perfect. We can cause damage chasing perfect. Know when to say when even though it’s difficult sometimes.

We have experience with the Dr. Color Chip system. Their paint match is spot on. We usually order a squirt and squeegee kit for clients, but we don’t apply it that way. We use this: Gold Label Detailing Fine Line Fluid Writer Paint Applicator Pen | Precision Touch Up Paint | Perfect for Rock Chips and Scratch Repair | .5mm Tip Brass Construction https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07N95TXM8/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_.7fvEbYQTZWCR A drop of paint and we literally fill the scratch in. Put a layer at a time. Let it cure. Another layer. And so on until it’s built up about higher than the surface of the paint. Let it cure until nice and hard and then polish it down. It’s not always perfect, but it’s an improvement and doesn’t make a mess. A heat gun helps those thin layers cure, but don’t burn the paint since they get hot. If you have questions, let me know.

I’ll add to what @mc2hill said. The clear coat is thin. And while it’s “difficult” to do damage with a dual action machine, don’t think for a moment that it’s impossible to do. If you’re chasing bad damage, you can drive yourself crazy. Step back five feet and see if you can see it? If you can’t, call it good. If you can see it and others can’t, you’re probably good. Lighting makes a huge difference. We can find imperfections all day long in our lit bay with 110,000 Lumens of light all over. Roll it out in the sunlight, and you can’t see most of what we can. Clients see even less. Keep in mind too, that the more you work the paint now...the less you have to work with in the future. Also once you take off about 1/3 of the clear coat, you impede UV protection which can accelerate clear coat failure. There’s a reason they make paint thickness gauges. And they’re precisely for situations like this when you’re not sure how far you can take it. It’s a tool most people don’t have in their box (a good one runs about $650-700). If you call around, you may find a shop willing to measure it for you (assuming they even have one) and send you on your way. If you find someone to do this, be kind and offer a few dollars for their time and tool. They most likely wouldn’t take it (I know I wouldn’t), but the gesture goes a long way to the next time you need help.

Thanks guys. Brought back an old post! So much I could add after another year or two of growth too! I’m constantly learning so much.

I have. The liquid wraps tend not to come off as well when you’re done with it and plasti dip historically has been a nightmare for us to work with when people have wheels done and all that. The plus side is they’re considerably cheaper than the vinyl.

@Dan@Adams Will the Adams Pro coating ever be offered to detailers already trained/certified/accredited by other manufacturers without paying for the training and attending? I ask because I’d open the option of us installing for members in the area and we have a wholesale account with you guys already. I just don’t think I can bring it in with paying for more training that’s essentially redundant to what we’ve already done. I’ve posted a lot of our work for a quality check if it helps. Just curious. I’d open a special deal up to forum members if it could happen and they wanted the Adam’s Coating.

I do like that look. After seeing this video, this might be the leader for me now. You can skip the first minute. The question is...satin so it’s got some gloss? Or matte? I definitely wouldn’t do that in a gloss finish. And I’m still thinking the black roof, posts and mirrors with wheels. Then just need a caliper color to set it all off. The calipers will be a color with the lettering on them a different color.

Not cheap is right. Honestly for this whole project the budget will likely be $4000-5000. That’s wrap, powder coat the wheels (with dismount and mount tires), calipers painted and all new badges/emblems and a ceramic coating. The coating cost is small for us because of the business. But it still adds up fast. The car isn’t going anywhere though and it is total protection.

The wrap is beneficial because we don’t have time to keep up with making it look it’s best most of the driving season. Matte doesn’t show dirty as much and if something brushes I don’t stress with a polisher fixing it. I’ll make sure I document the coating. The wrap is being done by ACI Dynamix. They specialize in wraps and do a lot of exotic work. So I’d trust them to do it right. And I’ve had a working relationship with them for a bit, so I trust them to take the car apart as needed and assemble it. They’re worth a follow on social media if you enjoy cars. The benefit in keeping with orange was not having to pay extra to wrap the jams and sills to make it look correct when the doors are open. But that cost is not a dealbreaker for me. You picked my top two choices actually. With the first being aquamarine I think. I want it to be different and it’s time for a change. The wheels going black is mostly selfish...I hate cleaning silver wheels (even coated) and the brakes on that thing bleed brake dust like crazy even just street driving. Black will hide some of that between washes.

Reaching out for opinions and thoughts...because sometimes other ideas come from nowhere and I like different visions people have. I’m considering wrapping my Lotus Evora. It’s orange with silver wheels as pictured here. My initial thought was to wrap it matte orange with a gloss black roof, a posts and mirror caps. I think I’m stuck on the black bits. Maybe even the door handles as well. The wheels and badging are all going black for sure. The caliper color is to be determined. Then the Mrs. asked why not change it all? Despite the extra cost of wrapping door jams and sills... Enter the idea of a color flip wrap. Matte Aquamarine Matte Turquoise Lavendar Matte Ultramarine Violet Matte Avocado There’s so many options. I can pick from 3M, Avery Dennison and Oracal films. Like I said, definitely black wheels and emblems. I’m stuck on a gloss black roof, mirror caps and a-posts...maybe handles. That could be gloss carbon too as an option. Caliper color is open. And body color is open. The car will be coated in a vinyl specific ceramic when it’s done to lock everything in. Share some thoughts and ideas. I need help!

Out of curiosity, take some fine metal polish to the wheels. See if it comes to grey instantly. If it doesn’t, they’re clear coated. Most (not all) aluminum wheels are clear coated due to maintenance issues. That being said, you can polish, seal and ceramic if you’d like. But no matter what raw aluminum wheels will need regular maintenance or they will look horrible and possibly be ruined.

New vehicles are prone to bonded contamination just like every other vehicle. Also being that it’s paint and sprayed by machine, it doesn’t mean everything is “level.” We tend to take a finishing polish to new vehicles to level out clear coat imperfections. It changes the look. What looks smooth sometimes isn’t until you’ve seen the difference. Here’s a coupe of graphics showing the different surface imperfections and what they are in your paint.

We do have the ability to offer resale. We do a little, but it’s extremely limited. I’ve thought about offering more, but the clients we have aren’t as interested in maintaining their own vehicles. Those that are, I’ll order in advance if we’ve talked about something they need or want. There is a huge barrier for us in resale. I’ll use Adam’s as an illustration. Being a small shop, we get a discount on product. It’s a decent discount, not spectacular. The buy in to get to the deeper discounts would be hard for us to ever reach. That’s okay, so we take the smaller discount that fits our volume. Adam’s sells direct to consumers. Adam’s also has discounts or sales they offer to customers. We are now in competition with Adam’s. Adam’s makes money if they sell to us, and they make more money if they sell to the end user. They clearly have more profit margin to play with and still be profitable. To be honest with some of the sales offered, we would be reselling product for zero profit or even a loss when you figure expenses in if we were to match the sales. If we don’t match the sales, in the age of quick shipping what’s the incentive to buy from us? Retail is a slippery slope and one we choose to stay very limited. I have no desire to compete with the manufacturers or importers of product for sales. They’ll crush us and still make money.

You bring up an interesting point there. Do we treat clients different from customers? I do...sometimes. I have a client who gets a special deal on ceramic coatings. Between him and his dad, in two years they've spent $18,000 with me. That doesn't include a referral here and there. So they get some special pricing for services they receive. When they refer someone to me, I tend to hook it up at their pricing as well. It's been a great relationship for us. That's a special exception. One other thing I do for my guys is I allow them the occasional "hook a buddy up" deal. If they have someone looking for something, I'll allow them to make it happen and take care of whoever it is provided it's not abused. I try to keep it to a job or two a year. I understand we all have people in our lives that are near and dear to us and we want to take care of for whatever reason. Could be family. Could be a friend who helped when they were in need. The why doesn't matter to me. What does is that that practice isn't abused. Those are some exceptions to the rules for us. You also hit on provide the service that's being paid for. Does it need two steps but they're paying for one? They get one and it is what it is. We are guilty of sometimes spot correcting a scratch on us or something similar. But it's a quick thing and at your discretion. We try to manage our clients expectations. Managing expectations brings up yet another point. I always try to paint the worst case scenario. If we find it's not as bad as we think or what we were told, I adjust the bill down. We look honest (which we are), and the client gets a nice surprise. It's easier to tell someone they're paying less than that they're going to have to pay more. One other topic that could become open for discussion is how do you pick what products you use?

I'll be honest, I have a distinct advantage over some small business owners when it comes to pricing my work. Detailed Reflections is a side business for me. I'm a full time firefighter. I maintain the business because I enjoy it (mostly), but more importantly than that I have two guys who work with me who somewhat depend on the money it brings them. They both have full time jobs, but I know the money they earn from the business helps them significantly. For me as an owner, that's no less important of a factor in making business decisions than anything else. Marquis and Justin have been very good to me over the years, stepping up considerably when my family situation changed literally overnight. I'll never be able to repay their hustle, but I can help make sure they have the opportunity to make the extra money the need or want. With that being said, Justin and Marquis aren't "business minds." That component comes more from me. I've been lucky that I've been able to include them in decisions, but also to help teach them my philosophies in how I run the business operationally. It helps us to avoid conflict. Being that this wasn't how I pay the bills, we were able to truly take a grass routes approach. The idea for the business came from me taking care of my truck I owned at the time. Then it turned into a couple friends asking if I'd do their car for them. And from there it was their friends and so on. It got to the point I saw the opportunity to make it a business. I brought Marquis in at the urging of my wife, and it was the best thing I could have done for my business. Those of you who have seen his work or know of him, know that he is worth every penny I pay him and more (he's well paid, don't worry about that). From there we grew and got to the point where we needed more help. We brought in Justin and taught him the ways and we are a solid team of three. We aren't looking to expand beyond that. We have never really advertised other than one ad at a local golf course which I'll never do again given that it returned exactly zero return on investment. We rely strictly on word of mouth. This helps us in a few ways. We tend to get people who are truly interested in us. It also means they generally have an idea of what they're going to spend before contacting us eliminating sticker shock. I'm very open with clients that we are not the cheapest around. With that statement comes that we are one of the best equipped locally to handle given work. We have seven or eight polishers, an assortment of pads/polishes/compounds, extractor, steamer, blowers, a lift and so on. Our polishing and coating bay has in excess of 100,000 lumens of light in it. Some clients take the time to listen and understand the value, some don't. Honestly, I don't sweat the ones that don't They were probably customers anyway. They're looking for the most for less and process doesn't matter to them. And being honest, in the world of detailing the average consumer doesn't understand the differences or the equipment anyway. They care about what it looks like when it's done. We are searchable online, so we do get business by way of google and social media but the word of mouth is where it's at for us. We have clients who travel well over an hour from other states to have us do work for them. For us, this is a testament to how we do business. Like anything else, we have peaks and valleys in our workload. Sometimes we are jamming. Sometimes we are slower. It all depends. Every time I think we are running out of work, something happens and the schedule fills right back up again. There's worse problems in life that we could have. My advice to someone starting a business if you don't understand the back end of a business is to take a few college classes at your local community college about business basics. It'll open up your eyes in how you need to set pricing, why you can't deviate a lot and make money...or when you can deviate and make money. It's great background information that will pay off ten fold in how you shape your business. If you don't know better and you start offering discounts up front, you're training you customers that they don't have to pay full price for your business. People will try everything to get the deal from comparing prices at other business to offering to pay cash. The cash argument is one that's a personal peeve for me. I record cash transactions even though it means I have to pay tax on the income and here's why. When we do work, the business incurs expenses. The guys get paid. Products consumed. If I don't record the income from the job, it skews the entire profit and loss of the business. I'm recording expenses and not income. At that point, how do I know how my business is truly performing? The truth is you lose a lot of control and information in making decisions when you start cheating the books like that to save someone a few dollars. There's more to gain for them than there is for you at that point. One thing we are doing to help with some of that, is we are changing our pricing structure to reflect out the door prices. The tax is simply built in, so it's not openly visible. It also helps with things like gift certificates. We offer those on our website, but people tend to buy based on the pretax price. We have always honored it and done the work at the cost of the gift certificate because I don't feel it's fair to someone who received a gift to have to pay out because someone didn't read correctly. We are hoping change pricing to tax included helps to alleviate that issue in the future. If you're starting out, do yourself the benefit of calculating everything out so you know up front what you need to make. It'll be easier to train customers that they need to pay "y" for a service than starting them at "x" and going to "y" when you finally figure it out. It's the "you've always done it for $100, why is it $150 now?" If anyone is thinking of starting out, I'm happy to have discussion about how we did it, how we do it, and what we learned along the way. If you take a trip back through my posts, you'll find a decent number of business related posts or we can discuss it again with fresh views.

So it’s been a while since I’ve written, but here I am. A potential customer called (and I’ll call him a customer, because he’s certainly not a client) and told me about his older Cadillac. Apparently it had some paint transfer on it from some kind incident and the inside needed to be cleaned as it was apparently pretty dirty. All of this isn’t a big deal for us and something we could handle. As soon as I gave him the price, he couldn’t get off the phone with me quick enough. This interaction got me thinking about different types of clients and how to handle them. At one end of the spectrum you have what I call value shoppers. They’re looking for the cheapest price and the most amount of work. These customers tend to be difficult to satisfy and maintain clear expectations with. They are also the quickest to run around speaking negatively should anything happen to not meet “their” expectations. At the other end, you have clients who don’t care about price but care about the service and product. These clients usually come by way of referral and are quick to speak highly of your services and if there’s any issues, they’re handled quickly and without making a big deal. These are critical relationships to maintain. For us, there’s a difference between a customer and a client. A customer is a single time contact. A client has ongoing relationships with you. They come back. They tell people about you. The value customer brings up an interesting point too. When a client brings up cost or walks away over cost, do you offer a discount? We don’t. We let them go. There are other companies that are price oriented, and they’re a better fit for that client. What we don’t want to do is to train our clients to dictate the cost of our service. We control that based on what we need to make to stay in business and be profitable. Once we start letting the client dictate price, we lose control of our business and profit margin. How do you deal with different types of clients?

Let’s take your questions in order. Maintenance varies based on the needs of the car. Is it swirled again? If so, the process begins. If it’s not, you can clean it up and reapply protection. We use a super fine polish that has a very tiny cut to it that we almost apply as a cleaner. That way we aren’t really trying to cut the clear coat. Assess the finish, and treat it with the least aggressive method to get the results you desire. How many times a car can be polished is a function of what products are being used and what damage is being repaired. Use a fine polish, and it takes such a tiny amount off. Use a compound and a wool pad, and the clear can come off pretty quickly. We use a paint thickness gauge to determine what we can and can’t do. As a rule, you only want to remove 1/3 of the clear coat thickness over the lifetime. Different vehicles tolerate polish/compound differently. Both of your vehicles tend to have a harder clear coat which is a bit better for standing up to polish. Subaru for example tends to have clear coat you can sneeze at and remove. Finishing polish will cut less than correcting polish or compound. BG shouldn’t cut at all when used on the proper pad, and neither should sealant. The pad plays a big role in the action of the cut. Use the right pad for the job.

We are a CP installer. Were the scratches there before they coated it? If so, they may have been too deep to polish out safely. You may be chasing a problem where the solution is a body shop. What CP coating level did you get? The top layers can usually polish off. The base layer is harder to work with. This is true of many professional grade coatings. It’s what can make some of the unforgiving to work with and why they require professional application.

Yup. You’re good to go. The heat and humidity might make it challenging if that’s a factor where you live in removing residues.

The best answer to this is to wipe it with an oil remover (ceramic prep) and then put water on it to see how it reacts. Without experience I’d use that as opposed to looking for “color change” since for some people, their awareness of color change may not occur until you’ve burned the clear coat. Different coatings come off with different amounts of abrasion. Some will come off with a polish. Some need a compound. Some of the ones we work with require wet sanding or a lot of compounding to remove.

I’d do a light polish to the affected areas and reapply the coating. Streaks sound like unleveled high spots.

That color will look even better polished out and sealed, waxed or coated. Gorgeous car.

With this pictures it’s really hard to tell. Were you working that one spot super aggressively? If so, it may have heated up. Was there any color transfer on the pads?

They are safe for vinyl. Use low speed, light pressure and a no cut pad to apply a thin even layer.

You ask questions that are difficult to answer without more knowledge of your goals. An extractor is an $800+ investment. You say you’ve considered one but are you looking at an extractor or a carpet cleaner? My wife uses a carpet cleaner in the house but when it’s a mess, she asks for me to drag the extractor in. They pull a lot out. For us it’s essential. But we also try to provide top quality products out of the shop. If you use it a lot, it’s more than worth it. If you’re just sprucing things up...it’s probably not worth the investment. You can do a lot with a steamer and a shop vac. It just takes time to develop the process that works for you.