Jaggies Reflection

[Shadix]

Hi, I'm new to detailing. Recently I had my first car, it's a red mazda 2. I noticed that the paint reflection is not smooth. The reflection is jaggies.. Is this correctable or not?
The paint is smooth, no swirls and I use NXT 2.0 since beginning..

Thanks, and I'm very sorry for my bad english..

[Marc08EX]

That's factory orange peel. From my experience compounding with the DA microfiber cutting discs and correction compound improves it but it will not make it totally smooth. If you want perfectly clear and crisp reflections without the jagged edges then the only way to fix that is to wet sand it and buff it out. I wouldn't advice you do that on your factory clear especially if you don't have a paint thickness gauge.

[Detailing by M]

Jaggies? That's a new one!
It's "orange peal"
After you paint something, the paint isnt perfectly flat. So you have to wet sand, buff, polish, wax.
But that take alot of time.
You might beable to get away with a good buffing with a compound. That would defanetly make it look better, just not 100% perfect.

[Marc08EX]

Re: Jaggies Reflection

Here's a picture from the most recent Saturday Detailing 101 class:

A quick look with the swirl finder light shows a huge improvement in the finish - the swirls are almost totally gone other than a few really deep marks, but the increase in clarity is remarkable. Look at the reflection of the overhead lights in the upper left corner compared to the lower right corner.

The whole thread is located here: Pictures from January 26, 2013 Open Class

The results you're going to get will highly depend on your paint's hardness.

[Michael Stoops]

Re: Jaggies Reflection

This texture in the paint, commonly referred to as orange peel, is common in factory paint almost regardless of manufacturer. We've seen some fairly light orange peel in relatively inexpensive cars, and really heavy orange peel on some very expensive cars, so it's pretty much standard in the industry. As others have mentioned, the only way to really remove it, or even noticeably reduce it, is to wet sand, compound and polish. But there are downsides to this:

• The entire process of wet sanding and rotary compounding is a very advanced process and not something you want to enter into lightly.
• Factory clear coat is quite thin, regardless of manufacturer, and the amount of clear that must be sanded away to remove the texture is actually quite extreme. Remove too much (and we're talking about microns of thickness here) and you run the risk of early clear coat failure.
• If you do remove all, or almost all, of the texture and you later on get a scratch in the paint, you're stuck. You've already removed so much material in the process of making it flat that no long have enough paint thickness left to safely remove the scratch. Or an etching from a bird dropping.

It's for all of these reasons that we don't recommend attempting to remove orange peel from factory paint, even if you have the skill set to do it properly.