What is color sanding?

Adam Pitale's video on his site gives a great video of what exactly it does. im not sure color sanding is the same as wet sanding, but he does wetsanding in the video. i think the main purpose is too remove surface defects quickly by stripping a very small layer of the clear and then polishing the paint back to new. looks like it would work but id never have the balls to sand paint. hopefully thats it, if i missed anything important some1 else will correct me.
 
"Back in the day" it was called color sanding because paints were single-stage and when the a finish faded from sunlight exposure sanding off the oxidized surface and exposing the underlying paint would bring the color back.



Back then, as now, most sanding was done wet so the terms "color sanding" and "wet sanding" became interchangeable whether you were sanding for color or for surface texture.



Even with clear coats one could argue that some of the original meaning lingers. As a clear coat oxidizes it turns cloudy and tends to obscure the underlying base color. "Color sanding" will make the top coat more clear, which in turn lets the base color come through.





PC.
 
pdsterns said:
On 2 stage paint is OP (orange peel) in the clear or base coat? or both?
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It is usually in the clear coat, the base coat is really easy to shoot and lays down pretty flat.



I usually hear the term color sanding used in reference to removing the OP after a paint job. I doubt that most detailers color (or wet) sand an entire car (very time consuming to do it right), but wet-sanding spot touch-ups is an easy skill to master that comes in quite handy.
 
Right you are Eliot Ness, I’ve heard it used that way too. It’s kind of strange when you think about it. Smoothing out OP doesn’t actually change the color, just the texture. And you’re not sanding on color either, it’s clear. But like I said, the terms have become sort of interchangeable. I forgot to mention that the term “block sanding� is also commonly used (and casually interchanged).



And speaking of changing the texture, many paints (and painters) don’t leave a smooth finish after spraying. In that case you need to sand them out to get any kind of gloss at all. Remember the phrase "x coats of hand rubbed lacquer"? Back then you needed to sand and rub (compound) lacquers because they had an almost matt finish when they dried.



You’re also right that the OP should be in the clear coat. I was looking at an A6 the other day that had been repaired. The painter messed up the base coat really bad and it was almost more like a sandpaper texture than OP. The texture was so rough there was no way anybody would ever get gloss out of it.





PC.
 
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