Is taping prior to detailing necessary?

[acsuppa]

3M Blue painters painters tape. It leave no residue but it seems to strip the life from the plastice trim. Dulls it. I guess it's just removing some of the protectant.

[hooked]

Originally posted by Tom Weed
My two cents and I just do this on the side to make some side money and to curb my detailing fetish. These are from last summer and I normally don't go to this much trouble to use newspaper on the windows, but I always tape the trim off when I am doing a customers car. I find it takes an average of 1 hour on a typical vehicle.



I did rotary work in this vehicle with a cutting pad, then followed by a polishing pad. Clean up was a breeze and I didn't have to keep going back over the car to see if I had missed anything.

Tom

Nice Job! Can I ask why you taped up the seam between the grey bumpers and the black body panels?

Was it to prevent wax from getting in those grooves? I assume you polished/waxed the bumpers as well so you would have to remove the tape from the grey and apply some to the black after you were done with the black?

[OctaneGuy]

Take a look at the reply to my post timestamped

posted: Jun 28th, 2006 at 07:19 AM

Not sure if anyone actually read it, but he states that he removed the tape BEFORE LSP.

What that means is he used the cutting pad on the rotary for removing the swirls and scratches, then removed the tape, and used a PC carefully to add the final wax (with the tape removed). We do it this way to prevent tape lines in the final finish or areas unprotected by the wax that have to be gone over a second time.

Richard

Originally posted by hooked
Nice Job! Can I ask why you taped up the seam between the grey bumpers and the black body panels?

Was it to prevent wax from getting in those grooves? I assume you polished/waxed the bumpers as well so you would have to remove the tape from the grey and apply some to the black after you were done with the black?

[Tom Weed]

Hey Hooked,
I think Octane guy summed it up pretty good for me. I only wanted to do swirl correction to the black painted areas with the rotary and didn't want to risk burning the plastic moldings on the side. I did polish everything with 80 on the PC and then went back to apply 21 after that. I am super cautious anytime I use a rotary and safe is better than sorry...

Tom

[Tom Weed]

I think I may have told you guys wrong the first time so I will clarify it. When I had the entire vehicle taped like in the pics, I only used the rotary with a cutting pad on the black. I removed the tape from the molding sections and on the gray areas and used 80 with the PC. After that I removed all the tape then applied 21 with the PC.

Hope this helps, I don't think I made it very clear or misspoke the last time.

Tom

[Newport Viper]

Tape warning!

If you tape off these grills on 92 to 02 Vipers..... USE Caution!

The paint can peel off! Put the tape on your pants first then peel off. This will reduce the adhesion by at least 50% or so.

Make sense?

[Chex]

didn't know that, but will have it really in mind :P even though there are no vipers in my town.

and as tom says, better safe than sorry in taping moldings and trim. I remember when I was learning at first, I did mess up some of my moldings, so now that's why i use them every time. even a foam polishing pad @1800RPM's can fade it a bit :S (in my experience), so I think a little more investment (cuz tape is an extra cash put in the car) can save you from mistakes and having to pay the damages to your customer