Mini meet with a Canadian GXP

[crash93ssei]

Jerry (repinS) and his girlfriend Liz are here for the weekend, he is doing engagement pictures for Heather and I and I am doing a detail on his GXP. Pretty low key meet, but as always a good time! Liz got her first ride in the Cutlass and needless to say we had some fun.... we will snap a pic and post that probably tomorrow, but I will tell you it was fun

Just posting these two pics so far. Some of you on facebook may have seen these from Jerry, a minor hit and run at a bar a couple months ago. After filling in some paint, wetsanding and polishing, it looks a little better now!

Before


After

[Bad GXP]

Wow! Jerry must be bouncing off the walls...

Awsome work Ryan!

Looking forward to the rest of the pics.

[Backhoe]

That looks fantastic! Nice work!

[Sadden]

Good work as always Ryan

[yonkerss]

Looks amazing!

When you say fill in some paint did you have to spray more on the area?

[crash93ssei]

There was some spots that were down to the plastic and I used some duplicolor touch up paint to fill them in. It was the little pen with a brush as well.

[crash93ssei]

What a great weekend! It went by way too fast because we were soooo busy the entire time, but we couldn't have asked for better weather. We got the detail done on Jerry's car, it looks amazing and took over 400 shots for our engagement pics today. They left about 7:00 to return home and should get home around midnight.

We also took apart Jerry's GXP headlight to do a final once and for all comparison against a regular SE / SLE (except '05) and SSEI, and found that there is only three differences... Jerry has pics though and you will have to wait for that to see for sure. We know that there has been a ton of discussion on the difference over the years, but it was all basically he said / she said and nobody really had the two apart side by side that we knew of so we did.



I didn't take hardly any pics, but I got some reflection shots off Jerry's car (go figure right? ) so I will share those.

This is after filling in many scratches with touch up paint, wetsanding them to level with the rest of the paint, three step polishing on those spots, one step polishing on the rest of the car and sealed up with Meguiar's #21 2.0.





















Jerry said I had to



Final shot as they left. The Corsa exhaust sounds flat out amazing on this car!!!

[nos4blood70]

Good God, does that paint literally sparkle now! Nice job Ryan. Wanna attack Penny in a similar fashion during the meet? jk

[Darrel]

Jerry said I had to

Only issue is your shirt is still on!

400 shots, not a bad engagement session I'd say.

[harofreak00]

Not to dis your work Ryan, but that's still some crazy orange peel going on.

My GXP is nothing like that. Has that car been painted before?

[crash93ssei]

We did nothing to attack the orange peel, the only wetsanding was to level touch up paint. Polishing alone does not remove orange peel. If I were to wetsand this to remove orange peel it would be a 40+ hour job and we just don't have that kind of time

So, no worries, you are not at all dissing my work, but you are right, the car does have some horrible orange peel. The only thing we went after was surface oxidation and minor swirls in the paint.


EDIT.....

I know there was some body work done on it, but there may be some that Jerry doesn't know about as well, but basically no idea if the paint is factory or not.

[SSEiMan01]

Looks great guys!

Wanna attack Penny in a similar fashion during the meet? jk

I still wanna see what I can do with Penny one of these days...

[repinS]

Yeah, unfortunately there has been some minor body work done on this car before, mostly likely to fix scratches and dings. My best guess is that one or both sides of the car have been resprayed, especially the passenger side rear door - there is a not-so-smooth paint blotch and slight colour mismatch near the front edge. You can see it in some photos. Fortunately all three previous owners of this car (including the original one!) are only a PM away on here or the Cadillac Forums, so I'll do some digging and see what's up.

So without further ado, some pics:

Before:


Bugs!




The overcast skies made this look a bit worse than it actually was.


At the house I used to live at for school, the driveway ran in between two houses with lots of foot traffic. Resulted in a few of these in the clearcoat from zippers, buttons, and so on:




Wheels








Tips cleaned




Mixing two touch up paints - one lighter, one darker than we needed


Magic.




Comparison of new/old:


Polished




yummy.


This was the sealant used


Curing






Done!


The Cutlass makes a cameo appearance












Was never able to do this before!


Ryan coming up with a quick fix for my stone-chipped arrowhead. Black brushed metal 3M Vinyl wrap!






Took a few more photos earlier today to show off the shine:











A big massive thank you to Ryan and Heather for having us this past weekend. It's always a great time in Sanford, Liz and I get so sad when we get closer and closer to home. See you guys in August?

PS: GXP headlight post to follow in General Chat in the next day or two.

[techweenie]

Wow! Such a nice looking car. Kinda sad I didn't get to see it. Mine needs a fair bit of work still to look that good.

Any word from the kid who bought your exhaust? I REALLY want that system on my car!

[ga93sle]

Ryan, I like to think of myself as being an *OK* detailer, and from a detailer's standpoint, the cleanup on that bumper is nothing short of awesome lol. The GXP looks awesome all around!!!

[nconti13]

Wow thats some incredible work Ryan! Very impressive. Jerry, your car looks great! The retrofited headlights are awesome and I'd love to hear what your exhaust sounds like. Cant wait for that GXP headlight post.

[Sirius]

You guys know this thread is 2 years old, right?

[techweenie]

The way I see it, if it's still here it's still fair game. I've met the people it applies to, so we're all on the same page.

[crash93ssei]

It is an old thread, but I think with a thread like this there is no information that can become irrelevant like in a mechanical thread.

Still gotta mess with those that didn't realize it's old though

[ga93sle]

Holy cow, did not even look at the date, never do!!!