Am I a dope or is it hard paint!!??

K

kleraudio

New member
I tried buffing out 1/2 of a 1997 Infiniti I30 the other day. Flat Black.



First I started with orange ccs and SIP 1500 RPM. Corrected some but not too much, so I tried 1800 RPM's. Nope. I then went to yellow and SIP. Nope. Then I moved to HTEC and Yellow at 1800 RPM's. (My most aggressive combo available).



It really didnt do much, the swirls were gone but the deeper stuff remained. Now can someone tell me if the Infiniti I30 paint is hard because that practice door I used when I first got my rotary got really mar free with ease and that was just orange pad and SIP.



Would a second pass or third pass help? Is this common to do 2 or 3 passes on a rotary?



Im really hoping that the car has unordinarily hard paint and I'm not just a dope.



Oh by the way, I found the yellow pad to be much easier to control than the orange pad....



Any suggestions or comments would be greatly appreciated.



Jim
 
Jim, if this is the first buffing that ten year old car has had, you gotta expect that the defects in the paint are really in there. There's probably a large percentage of them that are just gonna be too deep to really get out all the way.



Additional passes would definitely help. Instead of having to do multiple passes, I generally do a test section on the hood first. Try a pad/polish/rpm combo on a small section, then look at the result. If it's not what I'm after, I'll make a change and do another small area. I keep doing that til I get the combination that gives me the best correction/compounding marks ratio, then do the whole car with that combination. Then I do the same testing routine for the polishing step. It seems like more often than not, I end up doing a three step correction process: one compounding and two polishing. Then I do an IPA wipedown to remove all polishing materials (even though Menz says they don't put any fillers in their polishes, the Ceramiclear polishes do seem to naturally hide some light scratches), followed by a final inspection. Seems like I always end up finding areas that I need to do additional correction on. I fix those areas then proceed to LSP.



I've really become a firm believer in IPA before LSP. It makes it so much easier to find defects in paint when the paint is completely clean of all polishes and wax. Not to mention that it maximizes glaze effects (if you're a glaze user) when it's put on a completely clean surface. It also maximizes your LSP bond.



Anyway, I'm rambling again... Think I'll go hook up my new iPod hardwire kit I got for my car stereo today. :)
 
Oh yeah, it can take many passes, even with the rotary. When working on the '97 M3 I think "I'll keep track of how many passes I do with the aggressive stuff" but I end up losing track :o



Just give some thought to how much paint you really want to take off...is the (additionally) reduced marring worth it?
 
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