With the car nice and clean, Mike was able to start on the dents (as he could now see them). There were four dents on this panel and seven dents in total on the car.

People don't realize that if you buff a car to a mirror finish, it will show up all the imperfections, so it makes dents look far worse, so it's well worth removing them. Buy the same token the rear quarter had had some paintwork done and the orange peel effect was much reduced by buffing.

The shady looking character in the above photo is Greg Spink from ValetPro who popped in to see Willy Winterfalk while he was here (Willy is an expert who visits us from Sweden once in a while and is currently training our staff in the finer points of paintwork correction). ValetPro have a wonderful range of products and we have been swapping notes with him - so later we cleaned the glass with ValetPro's window cleaner, and Greg cleaned the paintwork with Willy's super special clay bars (made from Japanese riverbed clay!).

While Mike worked on the dents, will experimented on the boot area. As already mentioned, the paintwork was very hard on this Mercedes and so he decided to try a few different combinations to get the best results - he eventually opted for a lamb's wool mop with Extra Heavy Duty compound. This is a reducing compound which gets finer as you use it. This means that instead of three stages which we normally use - Willy was able to do all the buffing with this single stage and then polish out the buffing marks with the final stage. When the Heavy duty first goes on it actually puts more scratches on the car, but as you carry on in the same area it gradually removes all the scratches. With this method, a lot of heat is generated, the boot got so hot that as the metal expanded it caused a dent the size of a dinner plate! Of course, when the bodywork cools again, this disappears.. but it's little wonder that many valeting professionals are reluctant to buff cars.

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Finishing