paintwork Car care paint products for black cars

[LittleCasper]

So I've not long ago picked up my Black IS250 (Which I think looks amazing) and wonder what do people use to keep their paint nice and clear?

I've got a jet wash and used Autoglym Polar Wash, Polar Blast & Polar Seal on my previous car, but I plan on clay baring this entire car when the weather doesn't make my hands numb. Overall the car paintwork is in great condition, but it does need some TLC in certain areas after 15 years. 

Also if anyone has any tips on keeping my car looking good or has any general advice with just keeping the car running good that would be greatly appreciated.

[madasahatter]

Remember if you clay you will mark the paintwork. So will then have to machine polish, to bring her to her best.

[LittleCasper]

3 minutes ago, madasahatter said:

Remember if you clay you will mark the paintwork. So will then have to machine polish, to bring her to her best.

Actually I forgot to ask about that, I'm thinking of getting a Ryobi. I've got another very old car I can experiment with to get the feel. I was thinking of using Maguire's ultimate polish or they even do one that has black pigment in it, do you have any recommendations?

[madasahatter]

Lexus paint is soft and been black also, i would use something like rupes yellow pads, and perfect finish. I used these on my silver lexus.

[dephrank]

Same colour as mine which I may be selling sooner or later. Black wheels will make the car look even dirtier as the tyres will appear to be brown - lighter shade of black thus giving it a dirty look. I used iron remover, jet wash, clay bar, spray down, dry off, hand polish and then sealant. In that order. Waxing often will leave the car looking better with time. Cure time is everything. Some products require up to 8 hours after application to cure.

 

[Linas.P]

As above Keith mentioned above, you will have to polish the car if you clay it, clay is only good if you planning to do machine polish after that.

Lexus paint is soft and Sonax Perfect Finish seems to work very well on the car for finishing step, although depending on how your paint looks, it has almost no cut. Meguiars Ultimate Polish isn't actually polish at all, it is Glaze, so there is no point using power tools applying it and it does not remove scratches (it just fills them in). Don't confuse it with Meguiars Ultimate Compound which actually is polish, just maybe not the best out there.

I personally, have long stopped using anything that is sold in halfrauds or on supermarket shelves as I consider those products inferior, so no Maguires, no Auoglym, no T-Cut, no Carplan and no Turtle-wax. However, I must admit recently even these "supermarket brands" have somewhat came back from the grave and do from time to time make reasonable quality product e.g. Autoglym and Turtlewax now make decent ceramic sealant spray, which is definitely not comparable to true ceramic coating, but work great as maintenance "top coat" products, are very easy to apply and give great water beading. Autoglym UHD Wax was always quite good product, just kind of expensive for what it is, so unless you can get one on sale for £16-£20 it isn't worth the price tag.

For full polish, I would use something like Koch Chemie H8/H9 to cut, F6 to polish and then Sonax Perfect Finish to finish. If you want single stage polish without removing much of deeper scratches then M3 works just fine and it contains sealant... which may be good for single stage job, but bad if you want to apply something else for protection, then you kind of need to strip the sealant back before applying (in such case I would just use F6, because it finishes rather well).

In general I would replace every single product you use. Just because there are better alternative, Bilt-Hamber Surfex-HD/Korrosol for pre-wash (strongest APC + strongest fallout remover from my experience), Bilt-Hamber Auto-Wash for shampoo (just way more concentrated), the snow foam step isn't really important, so just use anything that provides thickest foam. Polar Seal is actually good product for what it is, extremely easy to apply although protection is short lasting. I would use either TAC Systems Moonlight if paint is not perfect, or if paint is perfect then I would take extra time to apply proper ceramic coat of your choice (I used to be Gtechniq guy, but to be fair there are better products now).

[Mr Vlad]

Blimey Liam. Don't and I repeat Don't look in the car care detailing section of this forum. Your brain will get frazzled and you'll become a vegetable. 

Just joking, or an I?,. Look in the detailing section but be warned, far too many 'experts' have donated their knowledge. 

Personally I use my local car wash place then finish off with Williams no water car wash stuff. Car shines like a mirror. Cheap cheerful and it Works.

[LittleCasper]

11 minutes ago, Mr Vlad said:

Blimey Liam. Don't and I repeat Don't look in the car care detailing section of this forum. Your brain will get frazzled and you'll become a vegetable. 

Just joking, or an I?,. Look in the detailing section but be warned, far too many 'experts' have donated their knowledge. 

Personally I use my local car wash place then finish off with Williams no water car wash stuff. Car shines like a mirror. Cheap cheerful and it Works.

Thanks for the caution.

[LittleCasper]

30 minutes ago, dephrank said:

Same colour as mine which I may be selling sooner or later. Black wheels will make the car look even dirtier as the tyres will appear to be brown - lighter shade of black thus giving it a dirty look. I used iron remover, jet wash, clay bar, spray down, dry off, hand polish and then sealant. In that order. Waxing often will leave the car looking better with time. Cure time is everything. Some products require up to 8 hours after application to cure.

 

I like those little mud flaps.

 

[madasahatter]

Experts or enthusiasts we all want the same goal, detailing cars is as easy as you want to make it. Cheap and cheerful may be your cup of tea.

As i explained if you clay bar a car you mark it, no getting away from that. 

[LittleCasper]

2 minutes ago, madasahatter said:

Experts or enthusiasts we all want the same goal, detailing cars is as easy as you want to make it. Cheap and cheerful may be your cup of tea.

As i explained if you clay bar a car you mark it, no getting away from that. 

The bonnet is the main problem area if I'm honest, but I'll probably just keep using my go to Autoglym stuff for the time being. I wouldn't want to jump into something and cause a mess. I'll have to get a bonnet from a breaker year to clean up.

[dephrank]

21 minutes ago, LittleCasper said:

I like those little mud flaps.

Yeah they stop all the debris getting on the body while driving but I’m tempted to take them off. Wish they were a gloss black like the car’s body. They ruin the lines 😩

[dephrank]

32 minutes ago, madasahatter said:

As i explained if you clay bar a car you mark it, no getting away from that. 

Ah!…just learning Lexus paint is different from ze German ones. Used clay bar only once on mine. Hopefully, I rubbed it the right way 😑

[Linas.P]

2 hours ago, Mr Vlad said:

Blimey Liam. Don't and I repeat Don't look in the car care detailing section of this forum. Your brain will get frazzled and you'll become a vegetable. 

Just joking, or an I?,. Look in the detailing section but be warned, far too many 'experts' have donated their knowledge. 

Personally I use my local car wash place then finish off with Williams no water car wash stuff. Car shines like a mirror. Cheap cheerful and it Works.

Detailing ≠ washing/cleaning. detailing is hobby which involves various degrees of OCD, you either care about it and you want to dedicate certain part of your life for it (because it is hobby you enjoy) or you don't care or don't enjoy it and it is enough just to "scratch" your car with dirty rag and bucket from sewer... and there are unlimited number of steps between one extreme and another.

The goal of detailing is literally to make car perfect with particular care to small details. The goal of washing the car is simply to make it practically clean... more or less. Again where do you draw the line? What is clean for one is not clean for another and vice-versa. 

There are people who never wash their cars, like literally for many years. I just happened to buy such car from auction which is relatively low miles for it's age, but I reckon it was never ever washed in it's life. There are people who polish their cars literally to mirror finish and spend £200 just for the products regardless of the time. And there are people in the middle - who kind of like their cars clean, but won't take much care or effort to make them perfect. For this middle group which is probably biggest, the local car wash with little bit of supermarket range of products is sufficient "level of detail" and that is fine, but "detailing expert" would have heart attack if their car would be treated like that, whereas "sewer bucket experts"... or generally non-car people and wives would struggle to understand the purpose of using even cheap products like Demon's Shine Spay wax, because "car is just appliance and it drives just as well shiny or not".

What I am saying - the reason why detailing section might blow ones mind (or may not) is the personal perception of what perfection is, serious detailers definitely go beyond diminishing returns when it comes to it (same like serious body builders or serious any-hobbyists) so for bystander it may look a bit extreme. I would probably rate myself ~8/10 when it comes to ultimate detailer, but I have spend over 30 hours detailing my RC last time and results were quite obvious. Certainly helped me to sell the car at asking price because buyer could not find any reason to negotiate the price (granted the car was as well mechanically perfect). Kind of sad I didn't take any good pictures of the process, but realistically I don't believe many people would find it reasonable to spend such amount of time detailing the car anyway.

The reason I mentioned multiple steps polish (which is clearly detailing stuff) is because of mention of clay bar, which distinctively is not necessary in simple car was and is only part of decontamination step in detailing. Sadly the product is kind of misunderstood and people who actually don't want to invest in time consuming polishing process often use it incorrectly marring entire car and then having even worse results than not using it at all. So if you commit to clay bar, then count in at least 6-8 hours of polishing after that, if polishing is not your thing, then better not to use clay bar at all. 

[LittleCasper]

2 hours ago, dephrank said:

Yeah they stop all the debris getting on the body while driving but I’m tempted to take them off. Wish they were a gloss black like the car’s body. They ruin the lines 😩

Can't you paint them?

[dephrank]

1 minute ago, LittleCasper said:

Can't you paint them?

Interesting question. Never thought of painting mud flaps before. Removal always came to my head first. 

[Mr Vlad]

Mudflaps can be painted but only with a paint that when dry is flexible otherwise it'll crack and look awful. 

My cars paintwork was ruddy awful when I bought it. Absolutely covered in millions of scratches. I took it to a trusted body shop who spent a day polishing the car using numerous different compounds. £200 later my car was 95% perfect. To obtain the other 5% would mean a full body respray.

[Linas.P]

15 minutes ago, Mr Vlad said:

To obtain the other 5% would mean a full body respray.

And that is most annoying thing... because resprayed paint is always softer (even softer than soft Lexus paint). So I would argue that achieving last 5% is simply impossible or at very least not practical, because it would mean making 95% of the paint worse to get 5% better. 

[Mr Vlad]

Linas. That would depend totally where the paint job would take place. Where I took my car did a previous job on a Ford Focus I had. Its cour was Deep Impact Blue. A Deep metallic blue very difficult to match. Because of a dent near the filler cap the rear wing which part of it went to the front of the car, also the doors were flashed into. Also I had the black trim colour coded to the car. The car looked outstanding. Oh the quality of the paint was better than the original. 

What you say is basically and mostly correct but when you're wrong you are oh so wrong and jump the gun a bit.

[Linas.P]

Please don't confuse what I am saying.

Paint harness is not the same as thing as matching the paint colour or making the car look good. I believe you  - you took the car to some place and they matched the paint perfectly and it looked better than original. Great!

Expect that paint they applied would be very very soft (or clear coat to be more precise) and from detailing perspective polishing repainted car is a lot more difficult, than polishing original paint, it is harder to finish well (because it is soft) and it scratches more easily. So basically, it is not as "good" paint from maintenance perspective as the original paint from the factory. And that is even if the paint job is actually good, which lets be honest here - rarely the case.

This again probably more specific to car detailing - the harder is the clear coat, the better. Sure one may need to use coarser compound/pad to cut the scratches (that is generally not an issue), but it finishes very easily to perfect gloss and it stays glossy for longer. Soft paint is easier to cut, but much harder to finish well (hence Sonax Perfect Finish is what I use on Black Lexus) and it is much easier to scratch, so the finish don't last as long. For example paint on the my old IS250 (which was repainted) was so soft that sometimes I would scratch when just buffing off the polish with MF cloth, so I had to have separate brand new very soft "edgeless" MF cloths specifically just to wipe-off after polishing. And the paint job I go was relatively good, car looked great, didn't have orange peal and they even applied extra layers of clear coat to make the paint look "deeper".

So again - the key difference is that paint they use in factory is different from the aftermarket paint used for respray and as far as I know there is no way of getting such paint finish outside of the factory. I am not saying it is not possible at all, but I have never seen repainted panel which would have same harness as factory paint.

[Ala Larj]

My advice is to not buy a black car! I love the look of most black cars when clean but unfortunately they don’t stay clean for long! On many occasions I have vowed never to buy another black car but have also on many occasions fallen foul of aesthetics over practicality.  I’ve used many products over the years and none have worked to keep a black car looking good once on the road. My only black car now is my 13 year old Honda Jazz and I stopped washing that a few years back. I now love the patina of old age! 😉

[LittleCasper]

1 minute ago, Ala Larj said:

My advice is to not buy a black car! I love the look of most black cars when clean but unfortunately they don’t stay clean for long! On many occasions I have vowed never to buy another black car but have also on many occasions fallen foul of aesthetics over practicality.  I’ve used many products over the years and none have worked to keep a black car looking good once on the road. My only black car now is my 13 year old Honda Jazz and I stopped washing that a few years back. I now love the patina of old age! 😉

Pfff it looks pretty, a seagull (flying rat) decided to leave a massive skid mark on my car today; if I was on my motorcycle I'd say I was lucky.

[Mr Vlad]

Not confusing what you say Linas. Regarding the focus I had partially resprayed. The colour matched perfect. Quality of paint and lacquer top notch. As good if not better than factory. Yes I found one helluva top notch body shop where 'that'll do' just won't do.

As for my is250 it'll never be perfect. It's owner from new just didn't look after how it was cleaned. Probably 99% through a roller brush car wash. Yes I can get it shiny but it's only shiny for a day or 2 but hey ho it's a great looking car and drives almost like new and sounds wonderful.