Scratches

[Terryliv]

I am a novice so bare with me and don't assume I know anything.

I have just added 2000 grit wet sanding scratches to my black, Urethane, clear coated 1.5 year old paint. This was done to smooth down the touch up paint I added to fill in some of the zillion rock chips the car collected driving 500 miles through a snow storm on a trip last November. The paint was originally cut and buffed and looked fine.

I have tried to machine buff it out using a rotaty buffer with foam pad using Mirror Glaze (MG) 1, medium-cut cleaner followed by MG 9 swirl remover 2.0.

This improves the scratches but still leaves a whitish haze because the scratches are not removed. I also seem to get a material build up in some spots that doesn't want to buff off. This build up is a stickey heavy coat of MG that will come off with a towel, but not with the buffer.

I performed this same cut and buff operation about a year ago with wonderful success. At that time the paint was about 7 months old.

Suggestions please.

Terry

[Mike Phillips]

Hi Terryliv,

Sounds like your paint has fully hardened, thus why you're finding it so difficult to remove the scratches. You could try re-sanding with #3000 grit, Meguiar's offers this very high grit paper.

I've removed sanding marks by hand using ScratchX on factory clear coats. It takes some persistence, but it can be done. The problem you're going to run into besides hard paint is that when you buff on small areas like a you have with touch-up paint you will find it very easy to heat the paint up very quickly. So be very careful and when buffing like this, buff for a few passes and then stop and let the area cool down.

You also might get better results with Meguiar's 80's series. You can try #85 Diamond Cut Compound with a wool pad, or #84 Compound Power Cleaner with our W-7006 foam cutting pad.

Best of luck...

Mike

[Terryliv]

Mike,

Thanks for your suggestions.

I am using the M-7000 Foam cutting pad. At your suggestion I tried the 3000 grit sandpaper that I had on the shelf. It didn't seem to work significantly better than the 2000 with the same Medium cut MG 1 cleaner.

Before I went to the store to buy the more agressive cutting compound you suggested, I tried more with what I had been using. I increased the speed of the single stage rotary buffer and decreased the amount of compound and it seemed to work quite a bit better. I believe I would see even better results with the more agressive coumpound and will try that next.

You were right on.

Terry