soft paint

[imported_tuffluck]

i have been refraining from taking my PC and polishing my new 2007 bmw (monaco blue) until i get my personal garage later this year, but this weekend i decided to put a coat of BFWD on my car by hand to hold me off until i get the garage. the day after i noticed the hood had a lot of dust, so i took a MF and some FK55 and decided to wipe it off, which left some relatively intense marring in one section of the hood (guess the dust was not just dust there and thicker particles).



on my old 2000 camaro that was basically the same color, this would have never marred the paint in a million years. now it looks like to me the monaco blue bmw paint is significantly softer and more sensitive to scratches than the GM was. i`m irritated!



i see you guys posting about never touching your car, getting new MF towels every few months, etc and now i`m starting to understand why. with my camaro it took basically sandpaper to scratch the paint once it was polished. i`m actually afraid to touch my bmw now at all, even washing it.



similar experiences/advice?

[Accumulator]

tuffluck- Sorry to hear about the marring. Yeah, that`s why yours truly never touches the paint between washes and also why I`m so off-the-deep-end about how I do those washes.



But FWIW, that sounds like you went from one extreme to the other; GM clear might not be like an Audi, but it *is* kinda hard.



But FWIW#2, if I tried to clean one of the Audis the way you did your BMW, I`d expect to mar it up something awful. Yeah, I know, other people say they do it all the time with no problems...that`s them, not me :nixweiss

[imported_tuffluck]

yeah. i guess i have to learn sometime. grrr. i will probably take the PC to that one spot this weekend and clean it up. that`s unorthodox, but it frustrates me too much!

[todd@bsaw]

I detailed a monoco blue BMW 335xi earlier this year I found it to be fairly hard and not soft at all. I think there was something else going on there besides the softness of the paint. If you use any pressure when wiping the car with a QD it is possible to marr. You should just be dragging the microfiber over the surface of the paint with the QD to act as a lubricant.

[imported_tuffluck]

no i actually didn`t use any pressure, and if i did, then it`s because you and i have a different definition of pressure. i was pretty light, and the marring is pretty serious. you know it`s possible the marring was already there before i did this, but just the direction of the marring makes me believe it was my fault. like you said, something else may have been at fault. maybe something got caught on the microfiber towel when i did this.

[todd@bsaw]

Just to be clear, I`m not saying your wrong and it`s possible the paint on your car is soft, but I want you to consider other possibilities before blaming the hardness of the paint. I have just found in my experiences with BMW paint, especially the same color, the paint was pretty hard. If you did marr the paint yourself either with a dirty MF or too much pressure, I`d wager that it may look worse than it actually is (ie. not very deep).