Help! Ninjas attacked my paint!

[rockford33]

Well, not really, but it sure looks like they did.

The other week I finally got to claying and polishing the car. Used Meg`s Ultimate Compound on a white LC CCS pad. Was real careful, cleaning on the fly, even using the brush every now and then. I thought everything was good. The following day, followed it up with some PB`s PwS also on a white LC CCS pad.

That is when I noticed a whole bunch of little nicks over a portion of the car. I notice them on the drivers C pillar and the top portion of the rear door and rear quarter panel. And they are only on the top portion along the body line, not the lower portion below the body line (which I did the whole panel at one time...). You may be able to barely (and I mean barely) catch your fingernail on them. They don`t seem real deep.

I am not sure if I induced them somehow with the buffer, but the are a lot of little nicks, about 1/8" to 1/4" long, straight, and in a random pattern (not circular at all, just random, some at right angles to each other).

I can`t seem to get the nicks out. I tried using a 4" white LC pad with the Meg`s Ultimate Compound, 4" white LC pad and 4" orange LC pad with PB`s SSR2.5, they did not seem to budge much. They faded a little, but it seems to be a lot of work and I am worried about going through the clear.

Looking for my options. I was thinking either wet sand (not preferred, but doable), keep on polishing until they get out, or maybe Dr. Colorchip.

I tried to take a picture, but I only had my camera phone and it was a rainy, overcast day today. You can see a couple of water drops on the top of the door panel, the rest of the whitish spots are the nicks. I`ll try and get better pics this weekend with my real camera.



Thanks,
Neil

[Big Leegr]

Did you notice them "not there" the last time you polished the car, or is this the first time you polished it? If it`s the first time, it is possible that the nicks were there all along, but the paint was in poor enough shape to hide them. It`s also possible that you have some polish residue in the nicks, which highlight them more.

If you have polished the car before and it didn`t have the marks, then I don`t know what to say in regards to their sudden appearance.

As to the method of correction, there seems to be too many to make filling in with touch up paint a viable option. Polishing may lessen the appearance, but remember that polishing a defect out is basically just sanding down the paint (very mildly) so you should be cautious about removing too much paint.

I say figure out what caused it, and if it ends up being something that is likely to happen again (sand storms, dirt flying at highway speeds or something like that) don`t bother with "perfect" correction.
You might even try glazing.

[rockford33]

BL,
I don`t think the paint was in real bad shape, but this is the first time I have had a chance to polish it in about 1.5 years It does get regularly washed though and I had never noticed the nicks before.

I also didn`t notice them this time during the wash, clay, or componding stages. It wasn`t until the following day when I went to use the PwS that I noticed them.

Since I don`t have any tool(s) to determine the paint/clear thickness, I will probably not go crazy with the 7424 to get them to disappear.

I was thinking of using the Dr. Colorchip "t-shirt" method to fill in and make the spots disappear, or at least be less noticable.

Thanks,
Neil

[Dubbin1]

Hit them with the UC and an orange pad.