Polishing down touch up paint?

Z

ZoomBoy

New member
So I had a few stone chips on the hood of my silver Honda Civic after I washed it. I decided to use the provided Honda touch up paint (brush, not a pen) and blob on a few spots over the stone chips after I cleaned them of any rust.



I figured today I would go out with my UDM once it had dried and polish them level with the hood. I've just come inside and I can't get them to flatten out!



Is this even possible? I did a touch up on my girlfriends black Hyundai with the provided pen and was able to polish it down to barely noticeable with my UDM but this time it won't budge!



Do I need a more powerful polish? I know I'm not using the best stuff for this intensive process (Sonus SFX-2) with a white DAS pad.



Any help? My hood somewhat looks like crap out of the sunlight now!
 
As far as I know (since I only use a D/A to apply wax) it's not going to be possible. First step after filling in the rockchips with the paint and letting it dry is to wetsand it. I usually start with 1200 grit and go to either 2500 or 3000 grit. The grab the good old rotary and buff it back out to a perfect shine. I suppose after wetsanding you could use the D/A machine with some aggressive pads and compound and start working it out. eventually you'll get there. But you gotta wetsand first before anything to get it smooth.
 
Ugh, not something I'm totally comfortable with. But since they are all small areas I guess I could try a more inconspicuous spot. Are there any good tutorials for this?? :think:
 
The nicer touch up paints generally are urethanes, tougher to polish. I usually wet sand with a small block, an eraser works good as a flexible yet firm block. If you have a metallic paint keep in mind they need to be clear coated. Wet sand the color and it will get lighter because you're thinning the tinted paint over the metallic layer. But usually small lighter spot are less noticeable than raised bumps of paint.
 
Great, thanks for the help! I think I'll give this a shot tomorrow. I guess if worse comes to worse I can always have my hood resprayed :nervous2:
 
I might try that blob eliminator as well first. I'm afraid of ruining the GOOD paint on my car by wetsanding.
 
You will need to wetsand after you have built up the paint then polish. A major problem that you have is that your car is silver. The touch up paint will NEVER match. The way the paint comes out of a paintgun is much different than with a brush, or even and airbrush, so the metallics will stand up much differently, and the color will look too dark. Sometimes you can ask the paintshop to add some pearl to the paint and sometimes it will make it a little lighter.







John
 
ZoomBoy said:
I might try that blob eliminator as well first. I'm afraid of ruining the GOOD paint on my car by wetsanding.
Click to expand...
It is worth a shot if you are afraid of wet sanding. Look at the link that haper provided and if you do a search there should be more here on Autopia.



It isn't a perfect system and for some it works well, for some it just works OK, and there are some who don't care for it. The most complaints I have read, and the problem I had, is it pulls the paint out of the chip. Since your chip is well dried you shouldn't have that problem.



Once you get the paint level and polished out will it be a perfect match? Probably not as JohnKleven pointed out with metallic paint. It's pretty hard sometimes to get a good (accurate) color match on solid colors. At some angles it will look good, some angles not too bad, and others it won't look so great, but hopefully it'll look better than the chip.
 
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