Kevin,
There are a few way to tell if the paint is single stage or base/clear. There will be paint codes listed on a plaque somewhere in the car, usually in a doorjamb or under the hood. You can check with an MB reference on the meaning of the codes. (But that won’t tell all if any panels have been re-sprayed.)
The classic way to test a finish is to take a cloth or foam pad that is a contrasting color to the paint (i.e. a light colored towel for dark cars or a dark one for white) and polish the surface with a product that has some cutting ability. If you get pigment transfer it’s colored paint, if not it’s clear.
It’s always really obvious with black paint but on very light colors you may have to look very closely. I like to use
Meguiar’s
ScratchX for that test because it does cut but it will always leave the paint looking good. (Old fashion orange rubbing compound will tell you if it’s single stage but will haze the heck out of the finish.)
A car that age is likely to have at least a few stone chips in the paint. If you look very closely at chips, perhaps with a magnifying glass, you can often see the edges of the paint layers and you should be able to spot if the top is clear layer or not.
But really, as Mike and
Accumulator point out, the paint’s workability is what’s important. Whether it’s ss or bc/cc is almost incidental. Either way, the approach is the same. You try a test spot with a mild product/process and see if it gets the results you’re after. If not, you step up the aggressiveness of the process and keep doing so until you hit the process that gives results. That way you have the least aggresive process that gets the job done.
Mike,
Maybe we could use
M105 to do an extreme makeover on my
white truck on Thursday night.
PC.