Here’s What A $4,000, 40-Hour Paint Restoration Looks Like On A DAILY DRIVEN Black E55 AMG Wagon.

a few months ago i bought this a 2005 e55 amg wagon that was used as a daily driver for the last 15 years at 146 000 miles it looked pretty good until you walked up to the car and saw this and this and this cosmetically the e55 had seen better days and it was riddled with rock chips swirl marks and scratches so i removed the hood the side skirts the fenders and the rear bumper ordered an updated e63 front bumper and side mirrors and sent it all out for paint the guys at mancuso's did a great job and after reassembling the car it looked really good especially with my custom headlights and its new lowered suspension but when you walked up to the car you saw this the rest of the e55s paint and clear coat was intact but it needed some attention so over the next three days the guys at chicago auto pros put in about 40 hours correcting the paint wrapping the car in paint protection film and ceramic coating every exterior surface all while i reassembled the rest of the car and changed things up a bit with a set of new wheels spaced out to perfection the end result is simply spectacular but it all started with a car wash is there a real difference between the clay bar and the clay mitt uh yeah a little bit so this is uh you know this clay bar here it's it's 20 bucks i claim it's around the same price but on a clay bar you're only gonna get maybe five or six uses out of it where like a clay mitt you can get like 30 40 uses out of it which one does a better job though this is why we're using that i feel like this just gets a lot more contaminants off and i feel like there's a little more marring with like the clay mitch or the clay towel so i feel like this is a little more gentle and i feel like it just pulls out more contaminants out of the paint all right looking at the car alex you got the whole front end that's just repainted looks good normally you'll see some sanding marks and stuff like that we're going to fix all that before we put any film on it but the biggest challenge is right here you know you got got your repainted panel and then you got your door here which is just filled with scratches and swirls and scuff marks so we want to make that look as close as possible to your brand new painted front end so we're going to do some extensive paint correction here um and i know it has 150 000 miles on it but we want to make it look beautiful yeah you got some sun damage on the trim pieces here so we can wrap those in vinyl make those look uh new the rails are really faded sun faded we got a couple different products that we can put on there to kind of restore that and bring that back to life we can actually do some film on the back bumper for you here too just that luggage rack because when you're pulling stuff out of here a lot of times this area is prone to sitting stuff on the damage there what happened there when i had this thing shipped to florida my mom was in florida to accept the car before i got there yeah and there was a big clump of dirt right here and my mom and i did a video chat so i could go over the car before she signed the papers to accept it i saw this i thought it might have been concrete so i just wanted to make sure yeah and the shipper the driver came out there and he said oh don't worry about it and he took a plastic wedge dry dry plastic wedge and was scraping it and i'm on the other side of the phone yelling stop stop just leave it it's fine that's crazy that a transport guy would it would treat a car like that it was poor i felt victimized i couldn't do anything and finally i'm like please tell them to stop right now she stopped the guy and then i see her with a bottle of water pouring it on there and then wiping it with a rag oh my gosh one of the worst automotive moments of my life they look deep but uh we'll get a buffer on that and see if we can make that disappear like it never happened [Music] if you guys are interested in anything you see in this video make sure to check out all the individual product links down below from carsupplieswarehouse.com this is quickly becoming the go-to site for automotive detailers everywhere and it's owned by the guys at chicago auto pros [Music] all right so the guys are done wrapping the entire front end in the expel ultimate self-healing paint protection film it's looking good this is going to make me feel much better when i'm cruising this car around knowing that i'm not going to get rock chips and scratches and if you do get scratches you can heat it up and they disappear so i have a bunch of work to do in the front end we have to reassemble all of these parts i have our new v8 compressor badge that's gonna go on this fender another one for that fender and jason is going to town he's working on the roof here and check out these rails yeah we did a little test spot here on these rails these are metal and they're very oxidized so i polished part of it and it looks like it's going to come out real nice and then we'll put a ceramic coating over that to protect it to keep it from oxidizing again and we'll be able to do these also right yeah even though these are plastic plastic right yeah they're plastic but they're flat so i can still polish them out they don't have any texture to them [Music] [Music] uh [Music] all right for the initial defect removal we're using a heavy cut compound this is obert cut and we're using a lake country this is a hybrid wool pad so it does really well at getting these big defects out and then we'll come back with a second step and refine the paint and that's where we'll get the depth and the shine to it [Music] all right jason and chris are done with the compounding stage next up is polishing out the entire car so any of the haze that you see in the clear coat now is going to disappear and it's going to look beautiful so i am moving on to wheels and wheel spacers and here are my new wheels so i've been talking about this for a long time these are the classic 19 inch cls 55 amg wheels i love the five spoke the simple five spoke design on this era mercedes and some of you guys really like these these are off a much newer cls 63 these are factory forged wheels the previous owner of the wagon spent five thousand dollars on these wheels with the tires on them and i like these too they're actually much lighter than those but this is always what i've had in mind so i found these for 800 bucks used so i sent them out to my guys at chicago wheel and they powder coated them in the factory silver finish new center caps looking pretty and uh yeah we're gonna see how these look i have 10 millimeter spacers from four wheel spacers.com i already have one on the back of this wheel and you can see the longer lugs are required so we have plenty of thread there i have not run spacers on really many of my cars so we'll see how this looks this is the lowered suspension now as well we did roll the front fenders so hopefully this tucks in really really nice and there's only one thing left to do bolt them on but before we do you guys can still enter for a chance to win the 2020 e63s wagon from omaze by going to omaze.com legit when you do you'll be given the opportunity to donate to a good cause and if you win the car you'll also get 20 grand cash in the trunk and shipping and taxes are covered too good luck oh yeah this is looking good in the front i think the wheel spacer brings it out just enough there's a little bit of space here we're not gonna damage the fender and i just love the look i love the look very cool very cool now the rear is kind of a different story i put the the 10 millimeter spacer back here and i don't think this is gonna work this is almost touching the quarter panel right here and we haven't even fully settled the suspension so i'm gonna try taking this spacer out to see what that looks like see if it would match the front all right so here it is without a rear wheel spacer and wow this thing is looking really nice i love the look this is so so cool uh and i did raise the suspension up so you guys know i put lowering links on the car but i can still adjust the suspension so this is the highest suspension setting and i'm probably gonna have to play around with this i actually like how it looks in the rear this is nice i don't think it's going to rub anything i can fit my fingers all the way in here basically but when we raise it up the front is a little bit too high for my liking so i'm going to have to play with these arms play with the adjustment i might hook up the mercedes computer and adjust it that way as well but overall this is looking awesome let me show you guys what it looks like with the other wheels so we have this or this i like this i like this this is cool this is cool let me know in the comments section all right so this is what it looks like on the lowest setting so it looks really cool this could be the show stance but i don't think i can drive with this at all there's no room whatsoever but i do like how the front looks in this setting so i can individually adjust the front and the rear uh so i'll just have to play around with this a little bit but this is really nice i like this a lot oh and for my 211 chassis guys if you want to update to the newer style mirror you do have to do a little bit of drilling and i'll show you why so you're basically remaking the mounting points so if you see these two screws here i had to drill little holes in the actual door uh and line these up with the factory threads in the new style mirror here is one of them i guess i could grind this down and try and get a big washer in here and another screw but this thing is on here tight i don't think it's going anywhere two should be fine um but that's about it there's a little foam piece in here that you can actually use as a template it fits in perfectly and then you make your little marks on the other side and drill it out that's about it it's pretty easy all right so we've made it into the clean room for the ceramic coating process i forgot the center caps for this side so i gotta run home and get those but the car is looking amazing all of the trim has been vinyl wrapped including this strip right here looks so good this has been restored we have an arsenal of ceramic coating products to apply to every single exterior surface of the car so yes it can look even better than this and jason what do we have going on here this is a g-technic line of coatings this is a consumer grade coating so anybody can get these these are easy to apply this is why i like using these coatings and we have a coating for every surface so i mean we're going to start off with the film paint protection film on the front halo coating that is made for paint protection film we're actually going to put a dual layer coating on the paint uh we're gonna start with crystal serum light and then put xo on top of it so two layers and then we got a coating for the wheels we've got a coating for all the trim restore all this trim the collin in here make that look good again and then we'll do the glass i know this depends on how well you maintain your car but roughly about how many years can someone expect out of all these coatings yeah if you're keeping it inside and you're washing it regularly you're going to get two three four years out of any type of ceramic coating all right starting off with the halo on the front end this goes on the paint protection film and this is really easy we're going to do half the hood here and we're just going to apply the product evenly on the surface and it's going to sit there for uh about a minute minute and a half and we're going to let this thing flash and then we just wipe it off it's that easy to use it just wipes right off what happens if you leave it on here for like three or four minutes well i mean the buffer out well this is easy enough this coating is easy enough where it will still wipe off but if you leave it there like overnight you're gonna have a high spot and then yeah you have to polish that off [Music] it's all done look at this car oh jesus that is the legit street cars wagon right there if you guys see me at carson coffee at any local meets whatever i'm probably gonna be in this now nice job dude i'm speechless it's too nice i don't even i mean can i trailer at home well there it is man i mean full paint protection film on the whole front-end rocker panels polished out uh corrected ceramic coated i even i i don't think you were here for this but we polished out the back window too there was a bunch of uh marks from this windshield wiper and they mostly came out yeah i know it looks great yeah you could totally see them before yeah wow those look awesome man perfect fitment look at that yeah this is tight man this is tight so this is in the lowered uh position right now which may just be my car show position at this point um one notch up is way more drivable but look at this i love the stance dennis does dense took out pretty much everything 146 000 miles i don't know if it gets much better and to recap uh the rear bumper has been repainted the side skirts have been repainted those are the e55 side skirts uh the e63 aftermarket ones just wouldn't fit right that is the e63 front bumper we have the 2007 to 2009 side mirrors the updated grille i replaced the lenses painted everything black cls 55 wheels dropped a little bit this is exactly what i had in mind when i bought the wagon i wanted to tastefully modify this car by using all factory parts or factory style parts but i wanted to kind of give it my own take of the best parts of the era so i think the cls 55 wheels the five spoke design just timeless they look fantastic they are freshly coated they look brand new i love the 07 to 09 e63 update in the front end and the side mirror so we did that just the best of the best for the era and of course we had it perfected by the best in the business and guys oh my gosh this is ridiculous i can't wait till some of you guys can see this in person it is just too nice look at this thing if you're curious the guys here at chicago auto pros in lombard illinois they have about 40 hours of labor into this car it took about three days they had a couple guys on it every single day i was in there doing little things here and there as well just kind of wrapping up some of the projects i had on the car like putting door panels on and the wheels and whatnot but yeah about 40 hours went into making this thing what it is right now and if you remember what we were working with before it looked good from a few feet away i don't know if this had ever been corrected before definitely not to this level but the original paint on the car the clear coat it was in good shape so it was a great candidate for this but man was it swirled up probably quite a few automatic car washes and whatnot and now it's basically a mirror and i'm so glad so glad they were able to get those horrible scratches out in this area from the car shipper who was scraping away at my roof it was horrible guys i felt victimized but these guys fixed it up beautifully and she is perfect just perfect in my eyes so let me know in the comments section what do you guys think overall of the wagon would you have done it any differently if so what would you have done and i think it's safe to say that i'm gonna be keeping this one for quite some time i just i don't see how i could ever get rid of it at this point which is just kind of crazy so anyway here's my e55 wagon and so that'll do it for today's video if you guys enjoyed this one definitely give it a thumbs up and if you live anywhere around the chicagoland area you gotta check out chicago auto pros they're in glenview and in lombard and everything you guys saw jason and the guys use will be linked down below at car supplies warehouse we got videos how to's that's right teach you guys exactly how to do this on your own card some of the best diy videos for detailing is on their site i'll link it down below and they've put together some really cool kits for you guys also whether it's for detailing your interior or ceramic coating they've got it all it's awesome it'll make your car look just like this so with that being said share the video with your friends subscribe if you're new and most importantly have an awesome day i'll catch all of you in the next video [Music]

Channel: LegitStreetCars

Views: 724,811

Keywords: E55 AMG, e55 amg detail, paint correction, ceramic coating, legitstreetcars e55, paint restoration, RESTORING A CAR, amg, car detailing, restoring an abandoned car, TRIM RESTORATION, buffing a car, CA

Id: Sq3SwIg49bI

Length: 20min 18sec (1218 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 25 2020