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Another busy night in the garage with one cool little project and one mess of an etched/stained Audi hood.
Let's start with the project car for the evening..... a 1967 VW Beetle with just 25,000 original miles on the odometer. The car was resprayed 15 or 20 years ago with single stage paint and it's got some issues, to say the least. Our goal on this night was not to wet sand it and make it perfect, but to make it a more presentable driver by removing the swirls, fine scratches and etchings. These first two images show the level of surface defects present (ignore the color shift due to lighting differences - the car is a baby blue color).
After a couple of test spots we settled on M205 with the yellow foam polishing disc for the initial correction step. Then it was time to put the crew to work!
Single stage paint transfer is a great indicator of paint residue build up on the face of a pad.
It's important to remove this build up on a regular basis, and spinning the pad against a towel does a great job of that.
While some toiled on the VW, others had little projects of their own to attend to.
Attacking inside the VW emblem with a bamboo cooking skewer wrapped in a microfiber towel and loaded with M101!!
All done! Paint texture remains but the gloss and clarity are greatly enhanced.
And before anyone comments on the less than gleaming white of the white walls, the car was going to be finished off later on at another location. We didn't just forget, or worse, ignore them!
With the VW out of the garage we rolled in an Audi A6 Avant to try and address this:
There was some really weird chemical staining/etching throughout the hood of the car. There had been a clear bra on the car at one point in its life, but that's gone now. Still, you can see the line from where it stopped and the staining started. But the really bizarre thing was that this horrible etching was evident throughout the hood, including where the clear bra used to be.
After a bit of experimentation we decided on microfiber Xtra cut discs and M100 as it made a noticeable improvement in the finish. Not perfect, but the paint isn't very thick on this car and the damage was very severe - we didn't want to hammer too hard on it.
Speaking of hammering on the paint, two of us went at with MT300 DA polishers and the Xtra Cut/M100 combo. We observed that Kyle was putting a ton of pressure on the pad and putting some fairly serious heat into the paint. That is generally not a great idea as modern paint really doesn't like heat much at all. Plus, that process is not super uniform, it stresses the tool, the pad, and the paint, and it increases the potential for damage. But Kyle was getting a pretty darn decent finish out of the paint by stressing it so hard so we opted to take a different approach.
We decided to go a bit crazy and DA damp sand the entire hood with a 3000 grit Unigrit DA finishing disc via pneumatic DA sander. You can see below how much of the hood is noticeable dulled down, and that the upper left quadrant here has been compounded to remove the sanding marks.
So, if we were worried about an aggressive compounding process stressing the paint too much, how on earth is sanding any better? Well, damp sanding doesn't actually stress the paint, it just removes really severe defects more quickly. With the water being applied, and a light touch on the DA sander, you can actually accomplish better and faster defect removal with zero heat added, which the paint hates anyway. You also accomplish this defect removal in less time than it takes to continually hammer away with a potent compound and an aggressive pad. We actually DA sanded this entire hood in less time than it took Kyle to very aggressively compound 1/4 of it!!! Removal of the sanding marks was incredibly fast; we could remove them fully with a single section pass of M100 on a microfiber cutting disc with moderate tool speed and only moderate pressure. That compounding process also put virtually no heat into the paint.
This is the final result after 3000 grit DA sanding and M100/DMC5 compounding with the MT300. This is before polish and wax! And again, we did this in less time, with less heat and stress to the paint, than if we had just hammered away with an Xtra Cut disc and a ton of pressure.
We'll leave you with this: if you aren't having fun when detailing a car, even if that car isn't yours but belongs to a buddy, then you're just not doing it right!!
Let's start with the project car for the evening..... a 1967 VW Beetle with just 25,000 original miles on the odometer. The car was resprayed 15 or 20 years ago with single stage paint and it's got some issues, to say the least. Our goal on this night was not to wet sand it and make it perfect, but to make it a more presentable driver by removing the swirls, fine scratches and etchings. These first two images show the level of surface defects present (ignore the color shift due to lighting differences - the car is a baby blue color).
After a couple of test spots we settled on M205 with the yellow foam polishing disc for the initial correction step. Then it was time to put the crew to work!
Single stage paint transfer is a great indicator of paint residue build up on the face of a pad.
It's important to remove this build up on a regular basis, and spinning the pad against a towel does a great job of that.
While some toiled on the VW, others had little projects of their own to attend to.
Attacking inside the VW emblem with a bamboo cooking skewer wrapped in a microfiber towel and loaded with M101!!
All done! Paint texture remains but the gloss and clarity are greatly enhanced.
And before anyone comments on the less than gleaming white of the white walls, the car was going to be finished off later on at another location. We didn't just forget, or worse, ignore them!
With the VW out of the garage we rolled in an Audi A6 Avant to try and address this:
There was some really weird chemical staining/etching throughout the hood of the car. There had been a clear bra on the car at one point in its life, but that's gone now. Still, you can see the line from where it stopped and the staining started. But the really bizarre thing was that this horrible etching was evident throughout the hood, including where the clear bra used to be.
After a bit of experimentation we decided on microfiber Xtra cut discs and M100 as it made a noticeable improvement in the finish. Not perfect, but the paint isn't very thick on this car and the damage was very severe - we didn't want to hammer too hard on it.
Speaking of hammering on the paint, two of us went at with MT300 DA polishers and the Xtra Cut/M100 combo. We observed that Kyle was putting a ton of pressure on the pad and putting some fairly serious heat into the paint. That is generally not a great idea as modern paint really doesn't like heat much at all. Plus, that process is not super uniform, it stresses the tool, the pad, and the paint, and it increases the potential for damage. But Kyle was getting a pretty darn decent finish out of the paint by stressing it so hard so we opted to take a different approach.
We decided to go a bit crazy and DA damp sand the entire hood with a 3000 grit Unigrit DA finishing disc via pneumatic DA sander. You can see below how much of the hood is noticeable dulled down, and that the upper left quadrant here has been compounded to remove the sanding marks.
So, if we were worried about an aggressive compounding process stressing the paint too much, how on earth is sanding any better? Well, damp sanding doesn't actually stress the paint, it just removes really severe defects more quickly. With the water being applied, and a light touch on the DA sander, you can actually accomplish better and faster defect removal with zero heat added, which the paint hates anyway. You also accomplish this defect removal in less time than it takes to continually hammer away with a potent compound and an aggressive pad. We actually DA sanded this entire hood in less time than it took Kyle to very aggressively compound 1/4 of it!!! Removal of the sanding marks was incredibly fast; we could remove them fully with a single section pass of M100 on a microfiber cutting disc with moderate tool speed and only moderate pressure. That compounding process also put virtually no heat into the paint.
This is the final result after 3000 grit DA sanding and M100/DMC5 compounding with the MT300. This is before polish and wax! And again, we did this in less time, with less heat and stress to the paint, than if we had just hammered away with an Xtra Cut disc and a ton of pressure.
We'll leave you with this: if you aren't having fun when detailing a car, even if that car isn't yours but belongs to a buddy, then you're just not doing it right!!
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