PinnacleAutoCT
New member
This 1987 911 was bought as a daily driver and was in need of some serious TLC. The car was fully repainted in 1994 with bc/cc, and appeared to have been wetsanded and polished at some point based on the very minimal orange peel. Though the car had a decent shine to begin with, the paint showed moderate-heavy marring and deeper RIDS under intensive lighting. The paint was also very rough in a way that indicated it had probably been parked near someone`s paint project and accumulated some overspray. The goal here was to remove 80%+ of the defects to amp up the shine and depth, then apply a coating to make maintenance much easier. I unfortunately didn`t get any full-car pics in the beginning due to my camera dying, so the before pics are mainly close-ups of the paint under LED lighting.
Before:
This is the driver`s side fender. Here you can really tell that the paint hadn`t been polished or properly cared for in quite some time:
Further down on this same fender you can see some vertical RIDS:
The marring continued on the hood and other panels:
The top panel of the front bumper showed a decent amount of deeper defects:
At first I was concerned that our initial plan of a one-step correction wouldn’t work due to the severity of the defects. However, after testing some polish/pad combos I realized that the paint was only moderately hard and responded well to a mixture of D300 and HD Polish on Lake Country black finishing pads (w/the Rupes 21 MKII). The result of that process was this 50/50:
At least 80% of the defects were removed with this combo, but in some areas there was some remaining micromarring, so a quick refining pass was done with CarPro Essence on LC black pads.
After:
Here you can see that the paint actually had a small amount of metallic flake that wasn`t visible in its early swirled-up condition:
The hood corrected well but was still peppered with tiny pockmarks from road debris:
In this shot you can see what a nice, un-distorted reflection this paint had once polished correctly. There really was almost no orange peel to be seen:
As you can see, the end result easily met our target of 80% correction, and adding 22ple to the corrected paint resulted in some great gloss. Thanks for looking, comments and questions are welcome!
Before:
This is the driver`s side fender. Here you can really tell that the paint hadn`t been polished or properly cared for in quite some time:
Further down on this same fender you can see some vertical RIDS:
The marring continued on the hood and other panels:
The top panel of the front bumper showed a decent amount of deeper defects:
At first I was concerned that our initial plan of a one-step correction wouldn’t work due to the severity of the defects. However, after testing some polish/pad combos I realized that the paint was only moderately hard and responded well to a mixture of D300 and HD Polish on Lake Country black finishing pads (w/the Rupes 21 MKII). The result of that process was this 50/50:
At least 80% of the defects were removed with this combo, but in some areas there was some remaining micromarring, so a quick refining pass was done with CarPro Essence on LC black pads.
After:
Here you can see that the paint actually had a small amount of metallic flake that wasn`t visible in its early swirled-up condition:
The hood corrected well but was still peppered with tiny pockmarks from road debris:
In this shot you can see what a nice, un-distorted reflection this paint had once polished correctly. There really was almost no orange peel to be seen:
As you can see, the end result easily met our target of 80% correction, and adding 22ple to the corrected paint resulted in some great gloss. Thanks for looking, comments and questions are welcome!
