Detailing a 200,000 Mile Car

hey guys good morning this is Ben with years in gasoline and today we're gonna be talking about washing cars now we're gonna go to Charlottesville Virginia where our friend Daniel has a shop called automotive aesthetic and he wanted to detail one of our cars for us and show us the whole process and we're trying to figure out which car we're gonna have them do but we realized at the end of the day there's really only one option it's gonna be Benz Forester so I've owned this car for almost a year now we've been using it as a camera car and I've literally never washed it but it's coming up on about time that I need to get a newer lower mileage car so this one's gonna have to be up for sale and I figured what better car to take to Daniel then probably the dirtiest car we can find hi my name is Daniel Wandel an automotive aesthetic here in Charlottesville Virginia we work on anything you know we work on anything from Honda Civics to expensive sports cars the way that I see it is you know everybody should maintain their car and everybody has a different way that that it worked for them or sometimes it doesn't work for them and then they end up watching videos on YouTube about how to do it some people don't like it some people do and I figured out you know we could get together and try to teach people what you know what they can do and at what extent they should kind of take a hands-off approach and say okay I want to trust the professional with this today we're gonna be cleaning up Ben's Subaru Forester it's it's gonna be fun though because we we haven't worked on anything this that it's never been washed in an ownership before so this is going to be an experience today we're going to be doing a couple different steps to the Forester cleaning it decontaminating it step 1 step 2 rejuvenating it polishing stuff like that and three protecting it hopefully we're gonna be able to get it all done today we'll see so the first step to proper car maintenance is obviously watching your door the first step for me is always putting a coat of film on the on the car what this does is it acts to kind of try to emulsify the dirt lift it away and or break it down so that before you even touch the car the car has the least possible amount of dirt or contamination that you risk putting swirl marks you know and and marring the paint but sometimes with on love marks you know people using you know caring trying to care for their car but not knowing exactly what they're doing it could be a million different things your wash meet what you're using it to wash the car with it can be the fact that you you know your buckets are you know you've got dirt and they're swirling around in these buckets of water and when it falls at the bottom and then you swirl back up it goes to the top great guards that's the way you deal with that that situation to bucket method rinsing the the mitt in a clean bucket of water before you go into the shampoo bucket with the soap solution going upward and downward motions on vertical panels rather than horizontally because if you do put in a swirl marks then only you only catch it in your eye if you're standing at the perfect you know the the Sun and the light is standing at the perfect place versus if you go side to side and you do put a swirl marking on the off-chance then everybody's in suit from any direction you know if you do this properly if you do these things properly your paint is good you know and it's you know it's something where it might need a little top up you know every a year or two years you know you might need a light you know fine machine polishing but you don't you won't need you know heavy duty corrections so the step two of this car we're gonna get it over put it on the lift and you're easy access to the bottom panels and everything we're going to tape everything off all the trim all the black you know anything that you could possibly get that white residue left over that nobody likes and we're gonna try to polish it we're gonna see it see what you know after we we clean it we're gonna be able to inspect it and know what we're working with and then hopefully you know we'll be able to figure out the right you know pad combination with the polish combination with the machine combination the best result one of the things is is that you have to know what you're doing and how much paint you need to take off you don't just come in and hit it you know hit it real hard with like a rotary wool pad and you know and it's just heavy duty you know compound and just level it on anything you only want to take off the least amount of pain awesome [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] because the factory headlights fogging up and fading is a result of the factory UV coating failing the proper way to deal with that is to completely remove the factory coating by wet sanding I usually started about 1500 grit you know go to 2,000 then 2500 and 3000 and then polish it out with these lights we don't have time so basically we you know we're doing the quick and easy the quick and dirty approach to just get them improved to get it sold we're not going for a hundred point or even just with the paint you know it's not that's something that takes me a week to weeks sometimes you know to make it at a hundred percent it's like the Bugatti Veyron so it takes you know 300 horsepower to get the car to 150 miles per hour after that to get the car from 150 to 200 miles an hour it takes like the rest of the 700 horsepower you got to do a lot more to get that last percentage so it's the same thing with cars with detail it you can get the car 50 percent in an hour and a half you can get the car 75 percent in five hours but for that last twenty five percent or that last 10 percent that's an extra two weeks [Music] [Music] [Music] in terms of protection you have three traditional forms of protection you have car nouveau axes you have sealants and now in the past couple of years the technology has gotten really good something called coatings with this situation we're probably going to use a sealant which will protect for about six months and it'll be good [Music] [Music] so while a car is here in my job I look at it as if it's my own after it leaves my shop it's up to the owner to maintain it properly if I go through and polish a car out and spend a lot of time doing it and then they go to a car wash down the street or they don't take my advice on how to wash their car correctly they end up with the same problems again because they didn't maintain it properly so ultimately it's up to the owner to really maintain their car the way that it's supposed to and it deserves to be washed it decontaminated it rejuvenated it and we protected it we restored the paint to a level that you know somebody could actually look at this and see the reflection in it you know there's edges and there's corners and stuff where truthfully like it's not perfect you know it's we did a 2-stage correction in like four hours they clean up really really well it's not a black car it's got like gold flake in it I didn't know I could have a car and not know that it had a color paint underneath [Music] [Music]

Channel: Gears and Gasoline

Views: 1,228,071

Rating: 4.869112 out of 5

Keywords: detail, car, wash, AMMONYC, gears, gasoline, gearsandgasoline, porsche, subaru, forester, mileage, high, drift, ej, awd

Id: qIhe8OmXfLk

Length: 9min 4sec (544 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 29 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/anapoe]

I saw the "before" picture and thought it was the "after" picture. My Forester might need some washing...

[u/redemption_songs]

Looks great. As an appraiser, I would certainly appraise this at a higher value because we see a clean car and think 2 things. 1. The owner cares about this car and 2. This will cost less to recondition for resale. Unfortunately, I see every flaw in every car even when I don't want to. For reference, what is the price range on a detail job like this? On a 200k Forrester ROI may not be great, but on something mid-high range I can see the investment paying off. Great job!

[u/ferrarilover102899]

As much as I think what you did to the car was awesome, I would like to highlight the incredible production quality of this video.

[u/ilytristanily]

I really wish you guys had more fans... your guy's video quality is bar none

[u/MambaBuckets]

How much does a detail like this cost?

[u/[deleted]]

I've weighed getting my paint detailed/buffed/polished/restored but ten year old Subaru paint makes me nervous...could it ever be too thin or weak to be restored like this?

I'd love to see the grandpa gold shine like it was a new coat of pearlescent champagne opal

[u/KingGumboot]

The camera work and editing in this video is exceptional, props for that as well as the actual content

[u/GloveSlapBaby]

I must be weird, because I wanted to see the inside cleaned.

[u/Dapeep17]

The only real problem with this video is that the forester was not dirty enough to begin with. Should have gone off-roading to see what they could do