Speed Boat Detailing: Oxidation & UV Rays

Video Transcript

"Hi, it's Dow at the Fire House Car Wash Detail Shop, I'm here with my friend Gel. What we've just done is we've done some removal of swirl marks. Now those are not very deep and so we were able to really easily go through with a light, we've got a high speed buffer with a foam pad, we've got a mild polish here that was able to just blaze those out. And you saw the difference in our previous segment. If you've got heavier scratches, if you've got scratches from the boat dock or from heavy abrasion from maybe the buoys you had hanging out there, we're going to go to a little more aggressive thing this time. That worked great, and you can do almost, it's hard to do damage if you're using those smaller polishes like this, now we've got an extra cut compound. More aggressive, it's going to cut deeper into the gel coat, even more prone, if you don't know what you're doing, to leave swirl marks so you've got to be careful. And we moved from a foam pad to a wool pad. The wool pad allows us to be a little more aggressive and so what we do, and this is a new finish so we don't want to put too much. "Gel, do you want to try that here or are we just going to talk about it?" "I think we ought to just talk about it because...". "Okay", we don't want to scratch this beautiful mirror-like finish up. But what you do here is on your more difficult scratches you just go on. Gel's an expert here, but what you want to do is you want to keep the polisher flat against the boat. We don't want to tip it, you want your, you're prone to think you want to use the edges but you don't. You want to use just enough compound, you don't want to saturate the pad, and then you want to move back and forth, you saw him in a back and forth direction, the same direction that the water would go across the boat. We're not going in circles, we're not going up and down, we're just going back and forth across the boat. That would remove the scratches, that would remove heavy oxidation. There's another area here, if you had heavy oxidation, a lot of times the dark boat, I see a lot of green boats that have been out in the sun and they just have that film over them, and this is the way you're going to have to get oxidation off is your wool pad and a really heavy cutting compound. And the challenge is on gel coat is once you've done that it will look great for a season, but at that point you're really going to have to remove oxidation every year after that. It seems once you get started it's hard to ever stop that process. You can keep a good wax on it, it will help protect against UV. The best way to keep oxidation off the boat, really is the wax which we're going to cover in the next segment."