Noobie needs help. How do I fix this

[xxkinetikxx]

Hello all,

First post here but I've been lurking for a while.

About 6 months ago someone bumped my tailgate and gave me a nasty deep scratch.

I took my tailgate to a local shop and they resprayed half of it.

It looks decent but is not nearly as shiny/reflective as the other side of the tail gate.

I have 0 experience wet sanding or using a orbital buffer but I do have one.

I'm not too worried about messing it up honestly as they only charged me $125 to fix it.

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Pics to follow.

[xxkinetikxx]

Re: Noobie needs help. How do I fix this



Good side

Bad side

[xxkinetikxx]

Re: Noobie needs help. How do I fix this

Weird pictures are not posting?

[Murr1525]

Re: Noobie needs help. How do I fix this

Pics from new posters have to be approved usually... shouldnt take too long.

[Michael Stoops]

Re: Noobie needs help. How do I fix this

It looks like they sprayed the paint and then never buffed it out. We've seen that on numerous occasions with inexpensive paint jobs as it's one way to save some money - eliminate a step. While we don't recommend that a novice jump in and wet sand and compound on a vehicle they care about, that's basically what this panel needs. Now, it's simple to just rub some sand paper on the paint, but it's a bit difficult to do it correctly, and pretty complex to then remove the sanding marks with a rotary buffer - and make everything look really good when you're done, and not worse than when you started. Especially when you've never done either process before.

You say you have an orbital buffer but odds are that won't really touch the sanding marks you'd leave behind if you tried to wet sand this. We'd suggest you start by going back to the body shop and asking them what they'd charge to do a light sand and buff just on that panel, or part of the panel. They should be able to do it very quickly (that's a huge benefit of knowing what you're doing!) and the cost should be minimal - but the gains in appearance will be huge.