Newb help.. Need help starting

[DEwalt]

I bought several products a couple of years ago to try to match the paint on a blackToyota Tundra. The driver side was painted, the passenger side was not painted. I tried polishing on the passenger side and the hood, and gave up. I could never get the truck looking like I wanted. I eventually gave up and sold it.

I own a newer Ram in red and my goal is to try to get the paint to look as new as possible. There is very light scratching, and I don't see much fade or spyder webs ect. The clear coat looks pretty good. I have some deep scratches here and there that were touched up with a pen and it doesn't look that good.

So here is the product that I own:
A Griots DA machine
Pads I believe are to be buff and shine
2 light green
2 orange
2 black
Mckees clay bar lubricant
Clay bar that looks a bit rough
Mckees Krystal vision glass cleaner
Car pro Iron X
Dodo juice shampoo
Poor boys SSR 1, 2, 2.5, and 3
Poor boys liquid Nattys Blue
HD Poxy Hybrid wax
Black ice tire shine

Can I get some advice on where to start? I washed the truck and its pretty clean. I would like to fire up the Griots DA and see what I can do.
This hobby is pretty enjoyable, but I daily drive my truck and it's a battle keeping it clean, especially with a 5 year old. Also I remember it being so confusing choosing product to buy. Chemicals aren't cheap so its not like I can afford to buy a bunch of things to try. Sorry for the rambling, hope everyone has a great day!

[MrNiceGuy]

Interested to answers as I have the same questions regarding products.

[itsgn]

A DA and some polishes/waxes are not enough to correct this level of defect. Depending on what the exact situation is, you need to take slightly different approaches - but all of them require you to get more tools and do more than just polishing.

A) If the touch up color doesn't match, you can't do anything to correct that. In this case the only thing you could do would be sand down all the touch up paint, and reapply a proper (possibly age-faded) paint in place. Then you'd need to take the same steps as described in B), to level and blend the touch up paint in.

B) If it's just the texture and thickness of the touch up paint that doesn't match, then you can probably make it better or possibly almost perfectly blend it in, without removing the touch up paint. You'd still need to wet sand it perfectly flat and flush with the surrounding, but this would require removing far less paint. Then you could compound and polish it, to make it almost perfectly blend it. You need to do wet sanding, because with just a DA you won't be able to remove a decent amount of paint and you won't be able to flatten the surface much.

If the touch up paint has been applied improperly, you might involuntarily strip it during the sanding or polishing process, or discover that it has blisters in it. If this happens, you'll need to reapply or at least correct the touch up paint (with more touch up paint), and start the sanding process over, to get decent results.

In order to get almost perfect results (perfect is out of question - you'd need to professionally repaint the whole panel/side for that), you'd also need to apply a cleat coat layer over the touch up paint base layer. Without that the shine and color tone of the touched up area will not match that of the rest of the panel. This can be mitigated by applying a ceramic coating afterwards, but you still might not achieve a "perfect" match. But if done properly, you can achieve a level, where even you'll have a hard time finding the corrected area, and where it will be virtually impossible for anyone else to spot it.

In any case, obviously you'd need to get some high grit (>2500) sandpapers (preferably in multiple grit levels, up to 4000 or possibly 5000, to make polishing easier) and an appropriate sanding block to start off. A thickness gauge is technically not necessary, but honestly I wouldn't even begin the process without that (as wet sanding is a rather aggressive method, and needs you to be more careful and precise, than just polishing). But based on what you wrote, I'd strongly suggest you do not attempt this on your own, until you spent at least a week watching videos about wet sanding - and even then go very easy, conservative and careful, because you could very well make things even worse than they are.