Unbelievable water spots on BMW

[ALLMAN BROS FAN]

Hey Guys....I just performed a paint correction on a Midnight Blue (beautiful!) 2006 BMW M3 that had some of the worst water spots on the hood, trunk, top, that I've ever worked on. I worked on a 2'X2' space on the hood with an aggressive orange LC pad loaded with UC for 10 min. or so. The paint was extremely wet looking after-wards but the water spots were not even touched. All the swirls were of course gone , but it looked like the spots were actually underneath the clear coat .....could I be wrong? All the side panels came out great( better than I thought they would) with a pass or two of UC and a few passes with Swirl X...and finished off with 205 before using 21 as my final coat. My question to you Pros. is simple. Is it possible that these water spots are etched into the clear coat, I really can't feel them with my fingernail because of all the buffing I did. I even took the same foam pad and hit it a lick or two with the high speed buffer and the UC and couldn't tell it helped at all. I can't send pics cause the car is gone now. This Doctors car has never had any serious work on the paint and it looks like it was never toweled off after it was washed, understand me now ....no intentional abuse .....just not much care, know what I mean? Please Tell me about these water spots guys ok

[Michael Stoops]

Re: Unbelievable water spots on BMW

It is very likely that the water spots are badly etched into the paint, even if you can't feel them. BMW paint is all over the map wih regard to hardness though, so it's not surprising you struggled to fully remove them. On some of the softer BMW paint removal may well have been quite straightforward, but we've seen some BMW paint that is incredibly hard and unresponsive. We've also seen cases of water spotting so severe that wet sanding was required to fully remove them.

[HealthyCivic]

Re: Unbelievable water spots on BMW

BMW paint is all over the map wih regard to hardness though, so it's not surprising you struggled to fully remove them. On some of the softer BMW paint removal may well have been quite straightforward, but we've seen some BMW paint that is incredibly hard and unresponsive.

Why is this? Is it because BMW uses different brands of clearcoat or because they spray their paint differently each time? Is there any real rhyme or reason?

[Michael Stoops]

Re: Unbelievable water spots on BMW

BMW manufactures in multiple facilities both in Europe and the US and they use different paint systems in these facilities. Some of the differences are due different regulatory issues and due to equipment used in the facility. We see this with Japanese companies as well, especially when they build some vehicles in Japan and others in the US. Honda is well known for having some incredibly soft and delicate paints on some cars (late model Civics and Fits) and pretty middle of the road paint on others. This is typical of most manufacturers, really, but some have wider variances from the "hardest" to "softest" paint they use. That isn't really good, bad or otherwise - it just "is".