Honda Fit GD3, Getting Its Shine On

To say the paint on the car had been neglected was an understatement. The poor thing either hadn’t been washed at all or had been washed with a rock.

The whole car was oxidised, cloudy and covered in scuffs and scratches. It was to the point where you couldn’t actually tell it was originally Nighthawk Black Pearl and had a blue flake in it.

I started with a wash and dry, which didn’t make the paint look a whole lot better. On the plus side, there weren’t a lot of contaminants in it, so I didn’t bother with a claybar.

Next, I moved on to a test spot on the bonnet; the classic 50:50.

A couple of quick passes with the DA and Ultimate Compound had me finally seeing some of the flake

The difference is quite remarkable. It’s a different colour.

I’m not a detailer, and loathe cleaning and polishing cars, so it’s far from the best it can be, but it’s better than it was.

Now that I was committed to the job, the next thing I had to do before polishing the rest of the car was to remove the horrible “old person” pinstripe that ran down both sides. I didn’t like the image the car portrayed with the stripe on it. They suit some cars, but not a Fit/Jazz.

Having never done this before, I had heard a caramel wheel is the go-to for stripping them off without damaging the paint, so I picked one up.

It’s a big rubber wheel. It uses friction to strip the vinyl off the paint.

I first tried it by going full send, and just ended up smearing melted pinstripe all over the place. No, there was a trick here. The trick was to use a heat gun first and peel the red stripe off by hand, as this was a softer vinyl and didn’t play nicely with the wheel

This left behind a bunch of adhesive, and I still had to deal with the silver stripe. This is where the caramel wheel came into it. I used it at a very low speed, and moving it along in a sort of lying down S pattern I would remove both the silver stripe and the adhesive.

Annoyingly it had etched into the paint a little, and at the start and finish of every single strip, the installer/butcher had used a knife and cut the ends, cutting into the paint.

I painstakingly removed all the stripes though

With that job out of the way, I moved on to polishing the rest of the car, panel by panel

The paint has a really nice flake in it (if you can ignore the fine scratches I’m yet to polish out)

Once I had made my way around the whole car and was satisfied (or as much as I could be, since my favourite Hexlogic pad started to disintegrate) I moved onto giving the car a coat of Chemical Guys Blacklight. This stuff is magic. It fills in some minor marks, and gives the black paint some real depth.

I really like this stuff, not just because it smells nice, but because it really does a great job with black paint. I use it as a sealer and put a coat of wax on top of it.

The last car I used this on was the Carib,

But I originally got it for Tess, because she also had very neglected black paintwork

Anyway, back to the Fit. Once the Blacklight was left for the required time, buffed off, and then left to cure, a coat of wax was applied and buffed off.

The results were impressive. No longer looking like a neglected appliance, the car was actually Black