YouTuber Revitalzes E55 AMG With Paint Correction & Ceramic Coating
Black paint exposes all your hard-earned hand wash swirl marks, but Legit Street Cars shows a simple paint fix makes it shine like new.
One of the most frustrating things about cars with black paint is the swirl marks that develop over time. Despite how much we try to wax and care for them, Mother Nature sometimes has her way. Frustrating imperfections on what would otherwise be a great car.
Alex Palmeri from the Legit Street Cars YouTube channel decided to hit up Chicago Auto Pros to perform the most thorough paint correction process possible on his E55. The goal? To see what the results are, and see if it’s worth it.
Palmeri starts off by focusing on the worst parts of the paint, saying “it is heavily scratched up ans swirled in certain areas, and there are generally just a lot of impurities in the clear coat.” Luckily all this can be fixed, but like anything that needs rejuvenation, it takes time and patience.
Starting things off, the surface has to be prepared. You can’t just go straight to the final step and seal in imperfections. To start off, all painted surfaces are given a clay bar treatment to lift dirt and debris up from the clear coat. This is then followed by a buffing and cutting compound to reduce the number of peaks and valleys in the clear coat, but care must be used in this step.
A paint thickness meter is used in order to see how much paint there is to work with, and that will determine how much clear coat can be buffed. And finally, any remaining dents are taken out.
Stopping at this point would still be a huge improvement, but there’s still more to go.
“We’re in the clean room with the E55 and we’re almost at the end of this process,” Palmeri says. Ceramic coating is the final step in paint protection because with all of the clear coat removed in order to get to the bottom of scratches, a new coat must go on top. Since there’s only a finite amount of paint on any given car, this extra added layer adds a significant amount of longevity to the newly rejuvenated paint.
Is it costly? You bet. Paint correction like this can cost anywhere from $2000 to $3000, however, your car ends up looking brand new. For the person who prefers to keep their original paint instead of going for a re-spray, there’s no other option.
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