Think twice before SSR2.5/Cutting Pad...

J

JaCkaL829

it was my first time...
So unfortunately i'm posting this because I feel i'm partly response for my cousin's truck etching....



A little background before I get you to the present. My cousin bought a 2000 Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo about a month ago, actually the day after I bought my RSX. He bought it privately and was a decent price with everything he wanted. Carfax checked out clean, only one owner, etc. So unforunately I couldn't see it before he bought it to give my opinion, so he went ahead and bought it anyway.



The truck was horrible and any Autopian would :scared: . Just to give you an idea of how "car friendly" the owner was he didn't even know how to open the hood. He did have most of the service records and what not, so my cousin figured a good day with me and it will be all good. The interior really cleaned up nicely and the exterior was in pretty poor shape. So about a month ago I helped him spend all day cleaning the exterior. Gave it a good wash twice, even though we had washed it before, clayed it which was odd because it wasn't picking up to much. Then the fun part, polishing. I started with a couple less aggressive pads/polishes but they really weren't cutting it. I finally decided on SSR2.5 with a yellow LC cutting pad via PC. I've used this combo before and really didn't think it was that aggressive. So I did half the hood and it looked great compared to the other side. Needless to say we both spent all day with that combo trying to take out as many scratches and defects as possible. I really wanted to finish up with FP2 to ensure everything was removed and not filled but due to time constraints we settled with VM by hand and topped with EX. Fast forward 2-3 weeks later, and my cousin now has 2 dime sized bird dropping etching on his hood. We even S+Wed it a week in that time period. Needless to say hes not happy but hes really not mad at me or what we did. The thing was before I even touched the truck he had a decent sized bird dropping etching on his hood. So i'm thinking the CC was on its way out before I even got to it, which is very odd for a car thats maybe 6 years old with only 48k miles on it. I'm sure when we used SSR2.5/Cutting pad that didn't help the situation either. Has this happened to anyone before? Any possible solutions? He was *thinking* about repainting it but I don't think its worth it. I don't understand how bird dropping can etch paint that fast. I mean prior to my Autopia days i've left bird dropppings on my car and NEVER had this problem. Even on friends and family's cars they have had it sit and never etch the paint like my cousin's Jeeps hood. I'm now wondering if Jeep paint is different or something?



Sorry for the vent, just really disappointed in the way things worked out. My cousin spent a nice amount of $ on it and hasn't really been too impressed with it. I'm sure my uncle won't let me use my buffer on his other trucks now just because of this. :furious:
 
If you search on this, you will see that other people have had the same experience. Some bird poop can sit on there for weeks, and wipe off without a mark. Some can be on there for 10 minutes, and etch. Apparently it's all about the bird, what he had to eat, etc.



Are you trying to say that you thinned out the clear and made it more vulnerable to etch? I don't think so...if you've got really bad poop it will eat right down to the primer...the extra mil you might have taken off wouldn't have helped.



EDIT: Oh yeah, of course paint varies from car to car, and the hood could have been repainted, which I would think would make it a little less durable than the factory paint. Just some more variables to throw at you.
 
I don't see how you polishing the car had anything to do with how badly the bird poop etched the paint.

Some bird poop will do nothing while others are like concentrated acid.



I've used ssr2.5 w/ cutting pad a few times now and sometimes it's been fine to go straight to LSP. Even with ssr3/cutting pad, a light polish like PwC will buff the paint nicely, so I don't think that combo is all that aggressive.
 
If anything, your polishing it probably made more resistant to bird poop.



Since it obviously had no wax/sealant on it before it's not like you removed any protection. The unpolished surface was very porous and likely would have absorbed the offending gunk even faster.



You just got lucky and got hit by a particularly aggressive bird bomb.





PC.
 
Yep, it's not the polishing that's done it, it's what the bird had eaten. My GF's Mini Cooper S has a bird poop stain on it that just won't budge, and that's only 18 months old and has only been deep polished once.



Ben
 
If anything, your polishing made it more resistant to bird poop.



The unpolished surface was very porous and likely would have absorbed the offending gunk even faster. And since you threw on the VM and EX you did the best that could be done.



You just got lucky and got hit by a particularly aggressive bird bomb.





PC.
 
I agree with the others , it wasn't 2.5 that did the damage , it was there long before you polished this truck . Take a look at the damaged area with a 30x magnifier to see whats happening . Pics if you have any
 
SSR2.5 is a great product. I've used it many times with a cutting pad without any problems. The problem was with the bird's diet, not the polish or pad.

I have left bird crap on my mom's car (yeah she was aware of the experiment :) ) for weeks, just as a test. There were no spots left over even after two weeks. The paint had been polished with SSR2.5 and a yellow Propel pad, and then sealed with UPP.
 
Avian defacation stains and etching have another variable beisde what our fine feathered friends have been eating.. the surface temperature of the vehicle. A darker color gets a lot hotter, which in turn accelerates the evaporation of the liquid component of the avian deposit, allowing it to etch a vehicle surface even faster.
 
Definitely not your fault...you can blame DC and the **** paint they put on the WJ. I had bird bombs on the hood and roof of my 99 that sat there for literally under an hour before I removed them (DFW to North Dallas) and my paint was already etched.



This is a common problems with the early WJ's as they were some of the first ones DC started doing with the new water based clear and the formula they were using was just terribly soft.



If you get funky with some 2000 grit paper and wet sand it very carefully you can pretty much take care of it. The clear is VERY VERY thin, though, so be careful because you can get to bare metal quickly. If you just get to the base coat, though, you can shoot it with some clear and make it look reasonably good in an afternoon.



Not your fault, though.



pops
 
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