swirl mark suggestions

[bobbyjos55]

i have this newly painted inner fairing on a harley ,sand mark i think,not much room ,need help ,thanks http://i1235.photobucket.com/albums/ff427/bobbyjoes50/IMG_0404.jpg,,http://i1235.photobucket.com/albums/...0/IMG_0403.jpg

[Evan.J]

Fix the photo

[bobbyjos55]

fix the photo,you cant see the marks?

[rlmccarty2000]

Can't tell how deep the scratches are. Try least aggressive method, but wait until paint cures.

[bobbyjos55]

well i am going to start with menzerna fg 400, by hand or should i be more aggressive?

[Don M]

well i am going to start with menzerna fg 400, by hand or should i be more aggressive?

I don't know anything about FG400, just make sure you stay with a mild polish first and that since the paint is fresh, you use a body-shop safe polish.

[Mike Phillips]

well i am going to start with Menzerna fg 400, by hand or should i be more aggressive?

That "can" work.

Working by hand requires more skill than working by machine just because most clearcoat paint systems tend to be hard, not soft and that simply makes it difficult for you and me to remove defects, (remove paint), by hand.

I wrote an article showing how I removed #3000 grit Trizact sanding marks by hand using FG400 here about 3 years ago...

The info in the article is just as accurate today....



How to remove wetsanding scratches by hand - FG 400


Anytime you're wetsanding a car there will be places you cannot easily or safely get a rotary buffer and a buffing pad to remove your sanding marks. In these situations you need an aggressive compound that you can use by hand.

The trick is to remove your sanding marks while not scouring the paint from the abrasives used in the compound. If you leave light or shallow scratches that's okay because the tricky and important goal is to be able to remove the sanding marks, you can always refine your results using a finer polish applied by hand.

For the wetsanding, cutting and buffing project on the mystery car this weekend there will be places where it will be risky to remove sanding marks using a machine, at least the initial cut.

So before leaving the well equipped Autogeek garage, I machine sanded one of our black paint panels and then tested the new Menzerna FG 400...


Paint panel machine sanded using #3000 Triazact...









Use a cloth applicator with a nap
To make any compound or polish more aggressive use a cloth applicator pad or cloth material that has a nap. The larger more stout the nap the more aggressive the abrading action.





Chemically stripping the paint
Looks great before chemically stripping so lets strip the paint to make sure the sanding mars are in fact removed. I don't care if there are toweling marks because I expect that from the pressure I'm going to be applying when rubbing the paint hard to remove small particles of paint.

Removing clear coat paint by hand requires putting some pressure behind the pad...




Sanding marks removed, only fine or shallow toweling marks remain...




Close-up cropped out of the above shot...




Chunk of masking tape to give my camera something more definitive to focus on...




From another angle you can see the flash of my camera lighting up the paint but you can also see how distinct the 4 florescent tube lights are overhead.




Here I've pushed the panel closer to the work bench to capture a reflection of the holes in the peg board...





Success!
We'll be using Menzerna FG 400 to cut out our sanding marks for the wetsanding project this weekend and for the areas we cannot safely buff by machine we can use FG 400 by hand. Yancy says he can capture this on video too...