Reconditioning weathered finish

[alwill]

Hello,

I just purchased a 2003 Toyota Tundra pickup and brought it home to clean it up. As far as I know it has never been garaged so it's been sitting out in the weather for nearly 4 years. From a distance it looks pretty good and I believe that the underlying paint is in good shape but, when you get up close and start working on it, the finish has a few problems. To the touch the paint surface is not smooth - it has a rather rough texture and, if one looks closley, there are tiny (pin ***** sized) dark spots over the entire body. I expect that this is probably some sort of pitch from sitting under a tree somewhere. I also notice that there are rather persistent water spots on the chrome surfaces (probably some sort of calcium build up from sitting outside so long) and I expect that the same as true for the paint surface (it's white paint, so it's difficult to see water spots on it). I tried rubbing it out with your #20 polymer polish but it won't touch it. I can scape off the pin head sized dark spots with my finger nail if I push hard enough but it would be pretty tough to do this over the entire painted surface. My question is, does Meguiar's or anyone else make any product that will take off the tree sap and/or the water mark buildup and not damage the underlying original paint/clear finish? Or is there a process that you recommend to take care of this problem. If possible, I'd like to get the paint back to as close to original as I can. I'd appreciate any advice you could provide.

Thanks,

Al

[Mike Phillips]

Re: Reconditioning weathered finish

Hi Al,

Somehow your post was never answered, it's likely because you posted this while we were in the middle of teaching a class, so we can't actively answer questions and we often take Sunday off, by then a lot of times questions can get buried.

S2Ki.com at Meguiar's - October 21st, 2006

Off to a good start...





We apologize just the same...


From your description, you need to clay your car after first washing it to remove loose dirt and then rub the paint out by hand with either ScratchX or ColorX depending on how many steps you want to do. ScratchX is a paint cleaner and after you use it you'll want to apply a coat of wax as it does not protect paint but merely clean it. ColorX is a strong cleaner/wax that will clean, polish and protect in one step.

If you want to work on this by machine we can help you with this also just let us know.

Mike Phillips