I think I screwed up

[dobie0791]

It was 90+F here yesterday and I was visiting my parents for a couple of hours. When I left their house, my car had a bird dropping on it. I did not park under a tree, but the car was in the hot sun. I got the bird bomb off right away with water and a MF towel (I did not have any QD with me), but the damage was already done- very bad paint etching. It almost looked like the cc was bubbling, but did not feel as bad as it looked. The paint is always protected with an lsp (poli-seal & s100 right now), but that seems to nothing against bird bombs.

Last night, I took some Scratch X (by hand- foam applicator) to my roof panel and gave the spot repeated passes until i got about 85% of the etching out, followed by some OP and poli-seal all applied by hand.

The spot itself looks fine now, but when I look at my car from a certain angle, that spot of the roof looks like it has a very slight ding in it from my spot removal of the clearcoat!!!!:soscared: I am wondering just how much clear I have left!

Did i go way overboard getting this etching out? Should I have just left it the way it was? I was wondering if I should blend the surrounding area with my pc and some OC or OP, but that would cause a large area of the clearcoat to be thinner.

My car is a platinum silver metallic 2005 Subaru STi and is a weekend driver that stays under a cover in the garage during the week.

Thanks for any advise.

[Accumulator]

The [repaired bird-bomb etching] spot itself looks fine now, but when I look at my car from a certain angle, that spot of the roof looks like it has a very slight ding in it from my spot removal of the clearcoat...Did i go way overboard getting this etching out? Should I have just left it the way it was? I was wondering if I should blend the surrounding area with my pc and some OC or OP, but that would cause a large area of the clearcoat to be thinner..



This is a tough call...both when you`re working on it *and* later when you try to second-guess what you did.



My Subies had pretty thin paint, so yeah you gotta watch how much you take off. But I`ve also worked on some (we had a lot of them in the family at one point) that suffered serious etching issues..so much so that I wondered how such thin paint could have such deep etching :think:



I suspect that you just "evened out" the etching and that most of the depression is from *that* and not from your polishing efforts. I doubt that additional polishing with the PC will a) do damage or b) fix it. Sorry, but the bad news is that you`re probably stuck with the depression (hazard of actually driving our cars in the real world ;) )...the good news is that you probably still have a safe amount of clear there.