I started polishing on the roof but after a couple of passes I soon realised that a couple of deeper scratches were remaining. The paint on the Gallardo was probably one of the hardest paints I’ve polished yet - a good bit harder than normal Audi Paint, however I wasn’t complaining as I prefer hard paint to soft paint.

An example of what was left after a couple of hits on the roof:



Yes it was small but it was there so it had to come out!

So out with another new 3M Pad, this time one designed for compounding with Fast Cut Plus (hence the green):



1800-2000rpm's were used for the majority of the correction work and this removed the few remaining defects perfectly, removing 2-3 microns at a time:



Below is a pic of the roof after stopping polishing @ 2000rpm's - no refining at all after the FCP. Even under the Sun Gun there was no evidence of buffer trails at all so this was a good indication of how hard the paint was:



I moved down to the bonnet next and again ended up switching to FCP after the 3.02 didn’t provide quite enough cut:



Fortunately, the vast majority of the driver’s side was fully corrected using the slightly less aggressive combination of the polishing pad and 3.02:







I could have gone at the entire car with FCP but I always try to remove all defects whilst removing as little paint as possible.

Round the other side was a bit different though. The rear 1/4 had picked up a couple of bad scratches at some point:



After 1 hit of FCP (sorry about the blurry pic, the camera didn’t focus well on the white at times):



Still there so another hit!



All gone except for a deeper scratch which remained:



This was too deep to polish out so I marked it with a piece of masking tape:



I planned to go back and remove any more defects like this one by wet sanding later on so that was the reason for marking them on the paint as they were hard to see at certain angles (multiple customers "examining" the car thought I was mad to go further at a scratch that they could barely see but I knew it was there and the aim of this detail was ultimate perfection).

The rest of the near side corrected the same as the off side with the 3.02 and polishing pad:



I stopped work at 7:30pm having corrected the majority of the larger areas.

Friday - Day 3

4" compounding pads were used throughout the detail for when I needed to get into the tighter areas:









Opening the doors allowed easier access to the lower sections and side skirts:





The fuel cap was in dire need of correcting:



During polishing (note the extra masking tape to prevent the edge of the pad from coming in contact with paint I didn’t want it to touch!):



After:



Polishing of the front bumper - plastics were polished @1500rpm's:





The rear bumper had significant swirling that was robbing the paint of its true clarity:



After FCP:



Even after the thorough claying stage there was still some exhaust contamination being pulled off the paint by the polishing step, here's a poor attempt at a 50/50 :



Fully corrected:



A bit of improvisation was needed to allow me to comfortably polish the engine cover



This was probably the worst area of the car in terms of RIDS so 2 or 3 hits per section with FCP was needed:



This was the last area of the car to be corrected (except for those that I knew would be corrected with the finishing polish such as headlights/wing mirrors etc) so I called it a day at 6pm - late enough for a Friday night!