Buff, Wax, Seal: Surface Integrity

With this post, DG welcomes our newest blogger, Diego Rodriguez, whose official bio is here. Diego, whom I first met at IDEO, is a brilliant designer, an insightful observer, and a real car nut. He'll be posting roughly once a week. We're delighted to add him to the DG team.--VP

I was quite taken by the photo of Cate Blanchett posted by Virginia last week.  As Virginia noted, it is difficult to resist the luminous beauty of Blanchett's skin, the perfect set of her hair, the exacting cut of her dress, and the just-so positioning of her jewelry.  She is a stunning vision of beauty, and to gaze at her is to give one's brain and heart a brief respite from the troubles of the world. 

Such is the power of surface integrity.  Physical aesthetics are a prime factor in the divination of glamour -- we find it in exceptional surfaces.  The smoothest skin, the glossiest hair, the deepest paint, the shiniest piece of chrome.  While in in reality no planar surface is truly flat, and no glossy finish is truly smooth, our eyes love to feast upon surfaces which are markedly more beautiful than the norm. Blanchett's skin is notable for its lack of imperfections, and that integrity is the foundation of her glamour. 

Let's shift our focus from organic skin to the skin of our extended mechanical selves, our cars.  I don't know about you, but I simply don't have the time or money to indulge in hand-washing my car, even though I cringe each time I take it to the machine washer.  Though it emerges cleaner, I know that the integrity of the paint has been degraded by thousands of microscratches created by rotating brushes and sponges, and each of those scratches slightly diminishes the overall gloss of the paint job.  Hence, when I pull up to the traffic circle of my local Ritz-Carlton (an infrequent event), my potential for a big arrival is greatly diminished, because dull paint is like dry skin: not so glamorous.  I'm still waiting for the valets to park my car up in the front of the hotel, but they never do...

Enter one pearlescent white Lamborghini Gallardo.  What if you had the time and money to strive for Blanchett-like levels of  surface integrity in the paint job of your car?  What would it take to make it so?   At what price glamour?  The owner of said Lamborghini (with only 1,000 miles on the odo, by the way) decided that the value of glamour was worth 55 man-hours of cleaning, polishing, buffing, masking, and sanding.

Here's what it takes to make a nominally perfect Lambo truly glamorous:

1. Pre-wash exterior with foam
2. Rinse under high pressure
3. Pre-wash wheels
4. Scrub brake assemblies
5. Wash wheel arches
6. Scrub tire treads
7. Mask engine compartment with foil
8. Apply soap solution to engine bay
9. Scrub engine bay
10. Rinse under medium pressure
11. Remove foil and idle engine to remove moisture
12. Apply soap solution to door shuts
13. Scrub door shuts
14. Rinse under medium pressure
15. Hand-wash exterior of car
16. Rinse exterior
17. Apply bug remover to front of car
18. Rinse front of car
19. Apply soap solution to all exterior trim pieces and rinse
20. Wipe all exterior surfaces (including wheels) with clay bar to pick up remaining contaminants
21. Rinse exterior to remove clay residue
22. Wipe interior painted surfaces with clay bar
23. Wash exterior with foam
24. Rinse
25. Dry with a leaf blower
26. Drive car with brakes applied to "wipe" corrosion off brake disks
27. Remove front grills
28. Mask all edges with blue painter's tape
29. Calibrate paint thickness gauge
30. Measure thickness of paint on all panels of car
31. Examine paint for surface imperfections
32. Buff 1 micron of paint off of entire car
33. Buff a further 2 microns of paint off of scratched areas
34. Wet sand (by hand) remaining trouble areas
35. Machine sand deepest scratches
36. Buff sanded spots back to gloss
37. Remove tape
38. Apply finish polish to entire car
39. Use jeweler's rouge to polish glass surfaces
40. Apply white primer paint to chipped area of paint
41. Apply final color coat to chipped area
42. Apply clear coat to chipped area
43. Run feather duster over entire car to pick traces of polish
44. Wipe down car with cleaning solution
45. Apply layer of wax to entire car
46. Buff wax off with towel
47. Wipe down surface with cleaner
48. Apply second layer of wax
49. Apply leather cleaner to interior of car
50. Feed leather with balm
51. Wipe down leather with clean towel
52. Wax door shuts
53. Buff off wax
54. Coat door seals
55. Apply metal polish to exhaust pipe outlets
56. Seal surface of exhaust pipe outlets
57. Seal surface of wheels
58. Apply tire gel to sidewalls
59. Buff out tire gel
60. Polish the license plates
61. Dust engine compartment
62. Seal engine compartment with aerospace protectant
63. Wipe down exterior surfaces with cleaner

That's a lot of steps to get to a truly clean car, but it's probably not that far off of an Academy Awards ceremony beauty regimen.  While Blanchett is most likely a beautiful woman on the worst of her days, we can bet that she'd been at the center of quite a bit of primping and preening on the day of the photo. Glamour, even when it starts from a stunning baseline, often requires a great deal of labor. 

To sum it all up, here's what "unglamorous" looks like:

And then here's glamorous:

Same exhaust tip, the difference is a matter of surface integrity. Glamour gives us a chance to believe that there's no such thing as entropy.  It takes us to a state of being where paint doesn't fade, where rust always sleeps, and where bodily functions, sickness, and decay don't matter.  For those moments of extreme glamour -- before you dirty the perfect Gallardo on public roads once again -- I suppose the satisfaction is priceless, because it's as close as we get to a feeling of timelessness.