by ACourtney » Fri Jul 31, 2015 9:03 am
Its worth investing in a power polisher and some foam pads. The Silverline sander polisher can be had for less than £40 if you shop around and will do the job fine - you will end up spending as much again on cutting compound and foam pads.
Farecla G6 in the paste compound is probably the best compound to go for. This is a medium grade that will work through the oxidized layer pretty quickly, but it also does a neat trick in that it breaks down into a finer grade - when you've removed all the variations in colour you keep going with the same paste on the pad, adding water to keep it flowing, but no new paste - so the same paste also gives you a reasonable shine at the end.
If that shine isn't good enough then you could also get one of the G3 finishing products. The standard G3 compound is a finer cutting compound and you shouldn't need it after G6, but they also do some finer finishing products in the G3 extra range to finish off the shine. The next problem is keeping that shine. If you garage your car then you can get away with waxing it just once, or twice, a year, but if your car has to live outside in all weathers then you will need to wax it much more often. You also need to know the difference between a wax and a polish - something confused by the vast range of products available these days - but a rough guide says that the quicker the wax goes on, the shorter the time it offers protection. A polish, as its name suggests, includes an abrasive to bring up the shine, but most of them also include some wax, or a liquid polymer, to give some degree of protection. However, that won't last long on a car kept outside. The Colour Magic waxes are popular with owners of gelcoat cars and have the benefit of filling any pinholes with the correct colour rather than showing up as a white dot, but they don't seem to protect the shine for very long so are best used in conjunction with another wax or a liquid polymer glaze. A good old fashioned solid car wax, such as a Carnuaba based wax, is usually best, though hardest to put on - use a lambswool bonnet on your power polisher to take some of the work out of getting the final shine. I've also tried Autoglym Extra Gloss protection, but not on a car that has been exposed to the elements so I can't really comment on how long its protection lasted.
Perhaps some other Midas owners can share their experiences
The weird patches and swirls that you see in the oxidized gel are actually the original brush strokes from when the gelcoat was first laid up in the mould. The pigment particles will lie in a certain direction depending on how they were applied and will thus oxidize at slightly different rates, revealing the brush stroke pattern. Of course when the gelcoat is fresh, or polished up, it is just a solid block of colour and the brush strokes disappear. The gelcoat finish on a Midas should be quite generous. They were originally double gelled (two coats) all over, with triple gel at the joints. So you can afford to be quite aggressive when buffing back. The only down side is that you have a red car and red is the worst colour when it comes to oxidizing, so you really will need to take steps to keep it shining.