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It must have been the sudden heat wave that reduced the head count for last night's TNOG, so for those of you signed up but failed to show, you missed some interesting projects!
When you've got the paint on your car looking good but those shiny black "B pillars" are all swirled up, what do you do?
You polish them, of course! Yes, just like you did on the rest of the paint. But don't be surprised if they behave a bit differently than the major body panels. Here's a half and half shot after using Ultimate Compound on a yellow foam polishing pad. The swirls, as seen in the top half, were pretty bad. On the bottom half the swirls are gone but we've got quite a bit of haze.
To remove the haze we swapped out the pad for a fresh one, and applied Ultimate Polish. That gave us the rich, deep black color we were looking for. And this was done by the car owner, who had never used a DA buffer prior to this. Not too shabby!!!
What do you do when your car has been repainted and there is so much micro texturing in the paint that reflects look like out of focus pictures? Well, in this case we lightly DA sanded with a 3000 grit finishing disc, then buffed out the sanding marks with the DA Microfiber Correction System. The micro texture was so severe that the camera focused on it rather than on the lights above, and you can clearly see how un-clear the paint is!
Just a quick pass with the 3000 grit finishing disc and the DA Microfiber Correction System, and we get this! We already know that a light touch with 3000 grit removes very little paint, and doing this sort of work with this process is actually less invasive to the paint when compared to just aggressively buffing. And aggressive buffing won't necessarily yield the same leveling result, which means you won't get as clear reflections. And just hammering away with an aggressive pad and compound will create quite a bit of heat, which really is not desirable. A little damp sanding introduces no heat at all, and you get a result like this!
Lastly, we have a non metallic black Infiniti G coupe with some serious issues on the vertical portion of the trunk lid. The emblem was removed by the owner, and now there are some etched marks left behind, plus more swirls and scratches than you can shake a buffer at.
We did the initial cut with a foam pad, but moved on to the DA Microfiber Correction System for the tougher stuff. We even did a little bit of light sanding to remove the etching from the old emblem, but unfortunately that etching is so deep that it can't be repaired. So the emblem is going back on. Still, we removed all those nasty swirls and scratches, as well as our sanding marks. But in the process we created quite a bit of haze. This paint was a bit frustrating in that it was fairly hard with regard to initial defect removal, yet it would haze badly no matter what we used. Even M205 on a foam finishing or polishing pad didn't remove all the haze. D302 Microfiber Polish on a microfiber finishing pad did better, but still not to our satisfaction. The haze doesn't really show in this group reflection shot, but trust us, it's there.
So what do you do when you can't remove the haze on problematic paint? You think outside the box. You think like Kevin Brown, that crazy mad scientist paint polishing guru who loves nothing more than experimenting with decidedly non traditional methods to overcome frustrating challenges. I don't think Kevin knows what a box is, so his thinking is always "outside". So, hold on to your hats, here we go. Take a burgundy foam cutting pad, lightly prime it with some M205, add three very small dabs of M205 (more like small smears of M205, actually), then spray the panel with plain water - quite a bit, in fact - and then start buffing with moderate pressure. Don't buff for very long. Don't think about "jewelling" or anything like that. Just moderate pressure, and one pass side to side followed by one pass up and down. Stop. Wipe off the residue. Oh, and wipe off the splatter from surrounding panels - yeah, this gets a bit messy. Then sit back and admire the totally defect free, insane shine from that same panel that frustrated you a few minutes earlier. There was a collective exclamation of "Wow!!" from everyone present because, well.............. wow!
When you've got the paint on your car looking good but those shiny black "B pillars" are all swirled up, what do you do?
You polish them, of course! Yes, just like you did on the rest of the paint. But don't be surprised if they behave a bit differently than the major body panels. Here's a half and half shot after using Ultimate Compound on a yellow foam polishing pad. The swirls, as seen in the top half, were pretty bad. On the bottom half the swirls are gone but we've got quite a bit of haze.
To remove the haze we swapped out the pad for a fresh one, and applied Ultimate Polish. That gave us the rich, deep black color we were looking for. And this was done by the car owner, who had never used a DA buffer prior to this. Not too shabby!!!
What do you do when your car has been repainted and there is so much micro texturing in the paint that reflects look like out of focus pictures? Well, in this case we lightly DA sanded with a 3000 grit finishing disc, then buffed out the sanding marks with the DA Microfiber Correction System. The micro texture was so severe that the camera focused on it rather than on the lights above, and you can clearly see how un-clear the paint is!
Just a quick pass with the 3000 grit finishing disc and the DA Microfiber Correction System, and we get this! We already know that a light touch with 3000 grit removes very little paint, and doing this sort of work with this process is actually less invasive to the paint when compared to just aggressively buffing. And aggressive buffing won't necessarily yield the same leveling result, which means you won't get as clear reflections. And just hammering away with an aggressive pad and compound will create quite a bit of heat, which really is not desirable. A little damp sanding introduces no heat at all, and you get a result like this!
Lastly, we have a non metallic black Infiniti G coupe with some serious issues on the vertical portion of the trunk lid. The emblem was removed by the owner, and now there are some etched marks left behind, plus more swirls and scratches than you can shake a buffer at.
We did the initial cut with a foam pad, but moved on to the DA Microfiber Correction System for the tougher stuff. We even did a little bit of light sanding to remove the etching from the old emblem, but unfortunately that etching is so deep that it can't be repaired. So the emblem is going back on. Still, we removed all those nasty swirls and scratches, as well as our sanding marks. But in the process we created quite a bit of haze. This paint was a bit frustrating in that it was fairly hard with regard to initial defect removal, yet it would haze badly no matter what we used. Even M205 on a foam finishing or polishing pad didn't remove all the haze. D302 Microfiber Polish on a microfiber finishing pad did better, but still not to our satisfaction. The haze doesn't really show in this group reflection shot, but trust us, it's there.
So what do you do when you can't remove the haze on problematic paint? You think outside the box. You think like Kevin Brown, that crazy mad scientist paint polishing guru who loves nothing more than experimenting with decidedly non traditional methods to overcome frustrating challenges. I don't think Kevin knows what a box is, so his thinking is always "outside". So, hold on to your hats, here we go. Take a burgundy foam cutting pad, lightly prime it with some M205, add three very small dabs of M205 (more like small smears of M205, actually), then spray the panel with plain water - quite a bit, in fact - and then start buffing with moderate pressure. Don't buff for very long. Don't think about "jewelling" or anything like that. Just moderate pressure, and one pass side to side followed by one pass up and down. Stop. Wipe off the residue. Oh, and wipe off the splatter from surrounding panels - yeah, this gets a bit messy. Then sit back and admire the totally defect free, insane shine from that same panel that frustrated you a few minutes earlier. There was a collective exclamation of "Wow!!" from everyone present because, well.............. wow!
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