I Screwed up. Again. Clear coat failure.

A

alext72888

New member
So I've been getting little chips and dings in the front of my car and decided to use Langka Blob Eliminator to "flatten" out a blob in a chip.

I rubbed a blob down on the hood, then used a really low power random orbital polisher to polish the hood.

At first, I thought I missed a spot, so I went over it again for a second, and the spot got bigger! I think I ate into the clear coat with the Langka compound and elbow grease.

So tomorrow I'll be making a phone call to the guy who fixed the other chip months ago that I screwed up with sand paper on his opinion.

Here are two pics. The first is normal lighting. The second is enhanced contrast so you can clearly see the outline.
 

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I think you hit the nail on the head with your assessment but it looks like I see a rather large cloud around that chip in both pictures with a smaller border immediately around the chip in the second picture. It is more pronounced in the second picture but the whole photo is brighter. Can you tell me what I'm seein? I remember your post last go round. Maybe you have a very thin clear on that car. It hasn't been repainted by chance has it?

EDIT: I looked a bit closer and I see both borders in both pictures. It almost appears to me that the camera never moved but the photo was made brighter in the 2nd take.
 
There are a lot of paint jobs (like our Sebring and my Dakota - both black in the 1995-2000 range) that was one polish away from clear coat failure. There was just not much paint to begin with so the lesson is to get a paint thickness gauge .
 
donbeezy said:
aren't you the same guy that sanded a spot by hand without the interface pad?
Click to expand...

it would seem so.
This is from the 1st post : "So tomorrow I'll be making a phone call to the guy who fixed the other chip months ago that I screwed up with sand paper on his opinion."
 
Sorry, but not all that surprised, to hear about this. IMO we here at Autopia put *far* too little emphasis on the need for clear to remain THICK. Even had this not turned into such an obvious/catastrophic failure, IMO it would've failed pretty soon anyhow since thin clear is extremely vulnerable to, well...pretty much everything that can damage paint.

It's *NOT* just about strike-throughs, it's about a few microns too many.
 
UPDATE:

So I went to the guy who fixed spot fixed the other chip I had and he said I just ate into the clear coat blending agent he used to spot fix the other chip.

SO essentially, there is still clear coat in that spot, its just factory clear coat, not the one he used.

Final Verdict. I'm going to leave it alone and just put a clear bra over it. It really doesn't look bad, and barely noticeable. With the clear bra the reflection difference will be covered and I can prevent future chips.
 
alext72888- Aj, that sounds like good news. Yeah, gotta go *very* easy on any blended/repaired areas. I bet that after a while even *you* won't notice it.
 
A quick question for everyone here before I make a new thread. If I put a clear bra over this, will it stop the size "spread" of the clear coat spot? I understand now that this is inevitable, especially since it was a clear coat blend, and not a total hood clear. Thanks.
 
alext72888 said:
A quick question for everyone here before I make a new thread. If I put a clear bra over this, will it stop the size "spread" of the clear coat spot?
Click to expand...

I dunno if anybody's crystal ball is reliable enough for you to get a good answer on that one.

You *do* plan to completely PPF the blended area, right?

While I've had panels clearcoat-blended even after such practices were rendered unfeasible (I've been told by numerous sources that the newer clears aren't supposed to be used that way) and I've never had any problems, I do find it odd that they'd do that on a hood instead of just reclearing the whole thing.
 
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