Polishing Gone Bad... Help!

A

autobahnshine

New member
I am in desperate need of good advice on what not to do next time, and what I can do now to help this situation. A friend of mine owns a Black '99 VW Golf, with SEVERE oxidation. There were 10 inch long scratches across the hood, and you could barely see any type of "reflection" (if thats what you call it). Today, he drove it to my house, and I washed it. This is where the problems started. I've never washed a hot car before, and of course, there were spots... Then after everything was dried, we pulled it into the garage. I clayed the surface with Griot's Clay & Speed Shine. Then I started with Machine Polish 3 on the orbital at speed 5. Results were very minimal, and Machine Polish 2 was needed, and then applied. We also applied MP3 to top it off. Then Best of Show. Everything looked great, but this was just the top 1/4 of the hood. We did the middle, and the pad to started to "shed" dried product. Then when we finished, we couldnt get any of the white color off of his hood... No matter what! Speed Shine, Water, Buff buff buff... still white patches.. even with Best of Show... Nothing helped... Was heat a horrible factor here????? HELP !:help:
 
vdubbya said:
Was the paint hot from the sun?
Click to expand...



I think both the engine, and the sun. By the time I polished that section, it should have been very cool. We did pull the car out into the sun a few times to check with the light, maybe the black paint heated up then ?
 
autobahnshine said:
I think both the engine, and the sun. By the time I polished that section, it should have been very cool. We did pull the car out into the sun a few times to check with the light, maybe the black paint heated up then ?
Click to expand...



Sounds like you might have put it on too thick or it didn't completely dry before you put on the next polish and it's all smeared around now.



I would rewash it and try using a light compound or paint cleaner and go over the whole car again on speed 5-6 with a light cutting pad. Make sure you work it in real good and take your time so that the product can dry and wipe off easy taking all that crud with it.



Got any pics would be helpful in us giving you advise.
 
When dealing with oxidation, I always like to use a paint cleaner as a first step (even before claying) to remove the oxidation and see what I'm dealing with. Meguiar's Medallion Premium Paint Cleaner was nice, but I don't know if you can find it anymore. Clearkote's Blue Moose Cutting Cream works very well too.
 
Is there a paint cleaner that I can purchase at Pep Boys?? I would love to keep using Griot's line, but I need to fix this problem Friday morning...
 
Got the Deep Crystal Paint Cleaner, and their Gold Class High tech applicator... Is it best just to go in a 'circle' pattern with this product? Here are pictures before any product was applied. The pictures do not capture the horrible paint as well as the human eye.. but maybe you can get the idea.... btw the long scratches are gone. Thanks for the help!























 
Today felt like another failure... better results, but the white residue is still there! In the first few pics, it was just wash and Megs DC1, then the last two show the results after machine polishing. Remember, in the first pics, the passenger side had not been machine polished yet...



























 
MPPC would be awesome for this job. A very underrated and unpopular product, but it gets the job done. Have your tried Meguiar's #83...it might be paintfully slow and maybe even dusty, but i think it could get the job done.
 
^ Good question. My old integra's primer showed through and looked similar to that after hitting the single stage red one too many times with the rotary for oxidation correction.
 
thats pretty nasty, pretty common around my parts though, from what i can see its oxidation, i just fixed an old stanza that looked very similar, the excessive marring made the oxidized surface look much much worse than it usually would. ec via rotary was my answer.
 
Are you saying that this white haze is polish residue? If so, and it's hard to tell from your pictures, you are working far too large of an area at a time, since it looks like almost the entire hood is covered. Did the DC1 remove what was on there from the other day?



I would work a very small area, about 1' x 1' with a good polish until you can verify if that is indeed residue or some kind of paint failure that you are actually making worse.



If you think that is residue from the polish or wax, then doing a very small area with some more polish should remove it. Don't polish if the paint is hot, work it long enough to break it down but not until it is dry. The residue should wipe off fairly easily, unless there is something about the Griot's polishes I don't know about. You are buffing the polish off after each step before it dries, correct?



In situations where things aren't going right, as in your case with this hood, just do a very small area until you find the combo that will work. Otherwise you'll wind up with a whole panel, or in this case almost the entire hood, that needs re-correcting instead of a small 1' or 2' area.
 
At the least I would have compounded it with a rotory buffer. You can wet sand a spot and see what happenes. That paint is bad
 
Eliot Ness said:
Are you saying that this white haze is polish residue? If so, and it's hard to tell from your pictures, you are working far too large of an area at a time, since it looks like almost the entire hood is covered. Did the DC1 remove what was on there from the other day?



I would work a very small area, about 1' x 1' with a good polish until you can verify if that is indeed residue or some kind of paint failure that you are actually making worse.



If you think that is residue from the polish or wax, then doing a very small area with some more polish should remove it. Don't polish if the paint is hot, work it long enough to break it down but not until it is dry. The residue should wipe off fairly easily, unless there is something about the Griot's polishes I don't know about. You are buffing the polish off after each step before it dries, correct?



In situations where things aren't going right, as in your case with this hood, just do a very small area until you find the combo that will work. Otherwise you'll wind up with a whole panel, or in this case almost the entire hood, that needs re-correcting instead of a small 1' or 2' area.
Click to expand...





I doubt this is built-up product... we worked it in very small areas (4"x8" max), and wiped it off before it dried. Griot's Polishes are very hard to buff out, and if we couldn't, we would spritz the surface with water (just like Richard Griot advices.). The paint looks amazing inside a garage, but once its oustide in the sun, it looks horrible.

This was after the DC1, however we did polish the driver's side on

Wednesday (only MP3 &2)



 
autobahnshine said:
I doubt this is built-up product... we worked it in very small areas (4"x8" max), and wiped it off before it dried. Griot's Polishes are very hard to buff out, and if we couldn't, we would spritz the surface with water (just like Richard Griot advices.). The paint looks amazing inside a garage, but once its oustide in the sun, it looks horrible.

This was after the DC1, however we did polish the driver's side on

Wednesday (only MP3 &2).........
Click to expand...
I would tape off a small area on the border of where it looks bad and not-as-bad:



VW.jpg




Then concentrate on that small section and see if polishing or a good paint cleaner (Klasse AIO, or maybe Meg's ColorX) is making it better or worse. If it gets better then you're going in the right direction, if it gets worse then you've got some paint failure going on. Also try looking at it (the paint) closely with a magnifying glass, often that will give you a better idea of what is going on than just the naked eye.



If you have polished this area and used the DC1 paint cleaner (noting that I don't have direct experience with either of the products that you used) and it looks worse than it did before, and it does look pretty funky, I suspect there are some serious paint problems going on with that hood.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top