Most liked posts in thread: OctaneGuy: Black 2001 Lexus ES300 Restore Horror!!

Thanks!

The Flex VRG 3401 is a forced rotation dual action orbital polisher. It's like a rotary buffer and PC combined in one. It's a tool I've had for a couple years and never loved it much less liked it. It has a lot of fans, but I just wasn't one of them.

I only began to appreciate it once I gained enough strength to operate it and had a real need for its best strengths. On the bad side, it fights your every move and not every pad/chemical combination works well. I much preferred my rotary over the Flex because I retained absolute control and precision while polishing. The Flex became popular because it was more powerful than a PC and less scary than a rotary, but really does require different techniques. I find that I use the PC, the Flex, and the Rotary as needed.

The best part about the Flex is that you can polish paint and closely match the results of a rotary in one step without having to do finish polishing with a PC to remove buffer trails and holograms. For my Express Details, minimizing the number of polishing steps is important. For some paint types the Flex is useless though, so it's not the magic bullet that works on all cars. It's a hard tool to use on tight/curvy surfaces like on a first gen MINI's bonnet but it does have it's uses.

 

Yeah it was pretty bad. I include with all my details instruction as well as product recommendations from my store on how to best care for their paint. I don't like the "hard sell" approach though, so I just let them know what products are needed as well as the best techniques to maintain the paint and if they opt to buy better products, I have them available to take home, but some of them feel that after spending their money on the detail, they don't want to spend any more, so not much I can do. Sometimes I'll just give them a proper waffle weave or microfiber towel as a gift.

A lot of the cars I do are second owners who want to get their new cars to them taken care of so they can properly maintain it. This Lexus had one owner only and although he told me he wouldn't take it to the local car wash anymore, I don't believe it, lol.

Thanks! I got more writeups coming!

 

Thanks I'm glad! The previous car they gave me, a Mercedes actually had the other shoe from that pair in the exact same place, lol.

Richard

 

Car washes and pure neglect. There were so many linear scratches that looked like objects like boxes were placed on the trunk and dragged off. Not sure about the hood though. I do know the owner liked his car, but had no clue about how to properly care for it. The first car he gave me was his wifes silver Mercedes and wanted to "test" us...I wanted his Lexus first because it needed more work, lol. But once he saw the results, we obviously passed and he was eager to drop off his car next, lol.