Hi Everyone,
I recently picked up a second hand i30 for use as a daily runner and thought I would get to know the car a bit more by joining this forum and learning from your experience.
I run an Auto Detailing Studio so the first thing I did was give the car a steam clean in the interior and good external bath:
After that I stripped the wax applied by the previous owner and gave it a decontamination bath and physical decon with a clay towel, there was quite a lot of reaction with the paint with bonded ferrous oxide which you can see in the purple deposits on the ground in this photo.
I then set about correcting this soon to be lovely paint to bring out the metallic fleck which was hidden underneath an opaque clear coat riddled with swirl marks and scratches, yet not beyond repair, here is a couple of test spot pictures to highlight the difference between before and after.
There were a number of deep scratches along there but nothing I couldn't remove, the paint on this car was quite thin compared to other manufacturers but was of a good quality I felt and certainly harder than Japanese paints, not too much peel but the varying depths confused me a bit, the bonnet was about 120 microns thick but the roof (where the most severe damage was from the previous owner putting things on the roof rack) was around 80 to 90 microns thick.
Here are a couple of examples of the kinds of scratches that were on the car which are now removed
They were taken in the typical spots you find your scuffs on a car where passengers have dragged their bags along the side of the panel on exiting and entering the car, a pet hate of mine for sure! felt good to eliminate these marks.
I then moved onto compounding the sides of the car, again it had all the typical swirling of a car of it's age in all the usual spots, yet another pet hate of mine is people who close the door using the paint instead of the plastic handle or the plastic door edge, which leaves marks like this
Fortunately they are easily corrected, leaving only that lovely blue metallic sparkle!
Another pet hate! scratching around the fuel filler cap!!!! grrr!!!!
Eliminated!
The poor boot lip
50/50 on the upper boot lip
All up I spent around 20 hours doing three stages of correction on the car, a bit of sanding on the heavy scratches on the roof and sides was also included in this and it was followed by two polishing stages. I am really happy with the results and the car looks stunning now in full sunlight with the metallic paint absolutely popping, I would rate it as high as I would other premium euro car's I have done in the past.
And of course, you don't spend 20 hours on a car's paint without locking it in with a nano ceramic glass coating - my coating of choice in this case is Cquartz Finest, which will give me 2 years of protection without the need for regular polish or wax. Phew!
The car is a great drive, yes it feels like a bit of an appliance when compared to my other car (07 Astra Turbo) but it does it's intended job well, the motor feels quite potent and pulls well up hills, no diesel fumes or anything like that under full power. One question I have is what tire pressures people run up front? I followed the specs in the tire placard but I feel like the front end is a bit under inflated? let me know what you run guys!
I really need to read the manual of the car to get a handle on the features of the car but for now I quite like the refrigerated glove compartment, will come in handy for the summer months!
Fuel economy seems to be great but haven't taken it for a good long road trip yet, I will be going up to Sydney in December and looking forward to see how she goes. Enjoy the finished shots of my new ride!
Bonnet looking amazing compared to where it was when I got the car!
Thanks for reading, looking forward to learning more about the car.
