Skyline

Car of the week this week, should be car of the month... not because it's the best car we have had all month (although many would argue that it is) but because it seems like it's been here a month! Mark did a lot of work on this car, so did Dave from Kraftwork and Steve our wheel man.

The car came to us, although it needed some paintwork, so Mark got on with the paintwork correction in the meantime. Unfortunately the bodyshop was fully booked up but it gave Mark a chance to experiment and really work some of the more damaged areas of paintwork. He experimented a bit to much on the front wing (nearest the camera) and went right through the lacquer! These things do happen and it's an occupational hazard. This particular wing had been resprayed before, so the paintwork was much softer than the rest of the car which makes it easier to go through.

The top of the wing where we buffed through the lacquer

Where the panel had been painted before, they had 'blown it in' from another panel and you were left with a jagged demarcation line. Normally we would just recommend that it be repainted properly, but we saw the same thing on a Porsche a couple of weeks back and Mark was able to buff out the area, so we decided that we would give it a go... after all, if we can do it it would have saved the customer the cost of the respray. Unfortunately, he couldn't do it, and in the attempt went through. But this wasn't much of a problem as the car still had to go to the bodyshop to have a couple of other panels painted. Sometimes, if a panel would otherwise be repainted, it's worth taking the extra risk to try and buff deep damage out of a panel, if it all goes wrong you haven't lost anything.

Davide Morena from Kraftwork did a wonderful job of the repainting, as usual. And as you can see from the top picture the whole car looks wonderful. (The bumper doesn't look so wonderful, that's because he hasn't taken the Diamondbrite off yet).

The car also had the wheels refurbished, this was too a bit of a tricky job. The wheels were magnesium with a chemical finish in a dull gold. There was no way we could reproduce this chemical finish (possibly anodized) so instead had to find a paint to match. We went though every colour swatch we could find going right back to the 1960s, but couldn't find anything close so we had to mix a colour which was close. When the wheels were done and the paintwork looking glossy, it looked absolutely wonderful. We even had a couple of people ask to buy it.

Although the car was only collected on saturday, already the customer has told all his friends at his Skyline club about it and already we have booked in another car.

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