I think I screwed up

[dobie0791]

It was 90+F here yesterday and I was visiting my parents for a couple of hours. When I left their house, my car had a bird dropping on it. I did not park under a tree, but the car was in the hot sun. I got the bird bomb off right away with water and a MF towel (I did not have any QD with me), but the damage was already done- very bad paint etching. It almost looked like the cc was bubbling, but did not feel as bad as it looked. The paint is always protected with an lsp (poli-seal & s100 right now), but that seems to nothing against bird bombs.

Last night, I took some Scratch X (by hand- foam applicator) to my roof panel and gave the spot repeated passes until i got about 85% of the etching out, followed by some OP and poli-seal all applied by hand.

The spot itself looks fine now, but when I look at my car from a certain angle, that spot of the roof looks like it has a very slight ding in it from my spot removal of the clearcoat!!!!:soscared: I am wondering just how much clear I have left!

Did i go way overboard getting this etching out? Should I have just left it the way it was? I was wondering if I should blend the surrounding area with my pc and some OC or OP, but that would cause a large area of the clearcoat to be thinner.

My car is a platinum silver metallic 2005 Subaru STi and is a weekend driver that stays under a cover in the garage during the week.

Thanks for any advise.

 

[Accumulator]

The [repaired bird-bomb etching] spot itself looks fine now, but when I look at my car from a certain angle, that spot of the roof looks like it has a very slight ding in it from my spot removal of the clearcoat...Did i go way overboard getting this etching out? Should I have just left it the way it was? I was wondering if I should blend the surrounding area with my pc and some OC or OP, but that would cause a large area of the clearcoat to be thinner..

This is a tough call...both when you're working on it *and* later when you try to second-guess what you did.



My Subies had pretty thin paint, so yeah you gotta watch how much you take off. But I've also worked on some (we had a lot of them in the family at one point) that suffered serious etching issues..so much so that I wondered how such thin paint could have such deep etching :think:



I suspect that you just "evened out" the etching and that most of the depression is from *that* and not from your polishing efforts. I doubt that additional polishing with the PC will a) do damage or b) fix it. Sorry, but the bad news is that you're probably stuck with the depression (hazard of actually driving our cars in the real world )...the good news is that you probably still have a safe amount of clear there.