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Took a quick holiday after painting my 69 roadster a couple of weeks ago ,and was exited to get back and continue working on it . This is the first car I have ever painted and I have limited experience with wet sanding and polishing, but after some youtubing and some trial and error , I came up with a pretty good system and thought I would share it on here.
I had applied three really good coats of clear to work with so I started by going over the car with a block and 1000 grit to level out any dust particles , nibs etc. And get them dead flat. Then I used my DA , with the hook and loop system and 1500 grit, spraying a light coat of water on all the surfaces. I kept at this until all surface imperfections were gone, then changed up to 2000 grit on the DA and same procedure, dried everything off then moved on to 3000 grit on the DA with a 1/2" sponge pad as a backing, spraying water as well. At this point the clearcoat is starting to shine again. I then masked all the edges and started polishing using the 3M number one polish that you will see in the picture, and a brand new wool polishing pad, at the end of this stage I removed all the masking tape and carefully polished the edges. Then changed the polishing pad to the blue waffle style fome pad , and used the 3M number two polish to go over the whole thing.
It turned out amazing. And if I were to do it all over again with out all my trial and error experimentation, I could probably have done the whole car in about 6 hours, the DA sander speeds up the process so much , it's amazing.
I need to do this and am gonna do very similar to your process. My clear layed out really nice, but some dust nibs. im gonna hit the nib spots with 1000 then start blocking entire car at 1500.
How long did the sanding disks last you? did they cut well the entire time? I tried a bumper with trizact kinda felt it gummed up the pads. I tihnk the clear was still soft, so i decided to wait a few months lol
Very nice. The fluorescents are the acid test as to how well you did.
This sounds very similar to what I did with the 3M product line. I think I even used that same air tool.
To the coupe owners, I will just mention that you should have smaller pads in addition to the larger ones Dave shows to get into the tight curvy areas on those car's rear decks.
NONN - yes, give it some time. The trizact should not be getting gummy
I started sanding the car two days after it was painted, I knew I was going away for a week so I polished the car right out before I left, thinking that it would harden up too much by the time I got back. When I did get back, I was a bit unhappy with the surface texture so I ended up re-sanding the whole thing and repolishing , it seemed to sand just as easy two weeks later as it did the first time. The foam backed sanding disks seem to last forever, I had three of each of the grits and did the car twice with them.
Last edited by Dave Cunningham; 03-11-2019 at 11:17 PM.
Nice job, I could not take enough pictures of my first paint job. The feeling is amazing when you see that shine come up. A very rewarding time after all of the hard work to get to that point. I like the idea of the DA with a sponge pad. I went the old school way and did it buy hand. Takes awhile.........................
03-11-2019, 10:07 PM
Wet sand and polish on my 69
