Kizashi Club

It seems like you have a good paint maintenance system in place. Probably was whoever had the car under their care before you. Aggressive swirling is the worst only beacuse you will most likely never be able to correct is with polishes and gels. If you still want to try the gel/polish route, try to find the most abraisive one you can find. You are just trying to get rid of the tiny microscopic burrs that were left in the clearcoat as it was scratched in the swirl. Once those are rubbed down, the swirl is easily hidden with a good carnuaba wax. If the gel/polish route yields no results, you are on to wet sanding the paint with an extremely fine grit sand paper. I have never done this myself and as I understand it is something that you can easily mess up with a lack of experience; but it is your last resort if the swirls are bothering you. Check out autogeek's forum for tips and tricks. Those guys are way more hardcore than me so they might be able to give you some better insight.

I had great luck with 3m Finesse It in the past.

No way would I wet sand the thin Kizashi paint

I can't believe I didn't post about this--I successfully did my own tpms release without the dealership about a week ago.

Then a few days later I drove the car 1000mi going from MKE to HSV and back in under 36hrs.

Oh, and I forgot to add how I blew out the driver's side headlight by accidentally turning off the car with the headlights on.

SamirD wrote:Oh, and I forgot to add how I blew out the driver's side headlight by accidentally turning off the car with the headlights on.

Huh?

~tc~ wrote:

SamirD wrote:Oh, and I forgot to add how I blew out the driver's side headlight by accidentally turning off the car with the headlights on.

Huh?

I manually turn on the lights, and I've found in most cars that if you turn off the car before turning off the lights, there's enough of an electrical difference to hurt the bulbs so that they burn out shortly after.

The Kizashi survived one accidental turning off the car before the lights. The second time got the driver's side low beam.

I leave mine in AUTO all the time, and the bulb lasted almost 4 years ... I think this falls in the same superstition/urban myth as turning off the radio and a/c before shutting off the car.

SamirD wrote:I manually turn on the lights, and I've found in most cars that if you turn off the car before turning off the lights, there's enough of an electrical difference to hurt the bulbs so that they burn out shortly after.

There's no rational to this whatsoever. I think your bulb just burned out.

You seem to have a lot of these "post hoc ergo propter hoc" theories SamirD, none of them hold water. Stuff just breaks, stop flailing around trying to find some innocent behavior to blame it on.

SamirD wrote:

~tc~ wrote:

SamirD wrote:Oh, and I forgot to add how I blew out the driver's side headlight by accidentally turning off the car with the headlights on.

Huh?

I manually turn on the lights, and I've found in most cars that if you turn off the car before turning off the lights, there's enough of an electrical difference to hurt the bulbs so that they burn out shortly after.

The Kizashi survived one accidental turning off the car before the lights. The second time got the driver's side low beam.

This is the first time I've heard of this. Is there any science behind it?

I pulled the Philips Blue Vision W5W bulbs off my GTI to replace the stock parking lights on my Kizashi when I install HIDs. They're supposed to be 4000K so they will better match the 4300K HIDs, as opposed to LEDs which are usually 6000K

Powerbulbs used to give them away for free with most orders but they're now $27/pair! It seems like you can buy them off eBay for $8-10 shipped, but no idea if they're actually genuine.

Here's a comparison with normal bulbs: