Body shop paint - stubborn swirls + overspray

S

subygirl

New member
It seems like every car I get to work on that has been resprayed has the hardest clear coat ever. This time it is my car. It had body damage about 3 months ago. The whole drivers side was fixed and resprayed mid March. Due to my schedule and working on everyone else's car, I am just now getting around to finishing it properly since the body shop apparently couldn't.



First thing - I have now gone down the drivers side of my car twice, working in 1ft x 1ft patches with a surbuf pad and M105. Gloss and clarity are maybe 70% better, but the swirling is 50% better at best. I have never had a respray area be this stubborn. Usually after two passes I can get it at least at 80% correction, if not better. I use a PC 7424XP. What other tricks are there? Usually the surbuf/M105 combo is my defect killer combo I use to pull out all the stops.



Second - I have overspray down half of my roof and the passenger side of the car. The roof overspray is very visible and the M105 is taking care of it. But the passenger side is that invisible kind of overspray that you can only feel. Clay isn't cutting it. And I am not hip on wetsanding the area. The surbuf/M105 combo is making some headway, but not complete. For the windows - a magic eraser did a great job actually.



Any other tips or tricks? I am almost at the point of giving up on the drivers side of my car and living with the swirls - which says a lot :mmph:
 
I ended up going to my 4" yellow pads + M105 as a last resort. Still not a swirl free finish, but a hell of a lot closer than it was. I would say in the neighborhood of 90% now, which is much better. My best guess is that the surbuf pads were getting clogged up and loosing their cutting power too quickly. I'll have to experiment with using even less compound with those pads next time. I was done with experimenting yesterday afternoon!
 
subygirl- I don't get quite the same wonderful results from the SurBuf/M105 combo that others so; almost certainly user-error on my part, but that's still how it turned out.



While I'm tempted to suggest you try a Flex or at least a Griot's Garage polisher instead of your XP, maybe just trying different pads could make things better. I found that the Meguiar's maroon cutting pads work great with M105, and IIRC they now offer those in 4". I hadn't used those pads for ages but *wow* did they impress me. Some pad/machine/product combos simply do/don't work and it can be a tricky thing to find the right ones.



On the overspray (leaving aside having the shop fix it), you might want to rethink the wetsanding just a little; the 4000 grit micromesh paper that David Fermani raves about will leave *VERY* mild hazing that the M105 oughta clear up just fine. I'm not a big wetsanding guy, but I find 4K stuff is soooo mild that I can even see it being more gentle than aggressive compounding. I use Mirka's foam-backed disks in 2K and 4K, and they really are easy enough to work with; the micromesh stuff oughta be even better.
 
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