Do you think its true the more time you do wetsanding the less time it will take to buff?

[Mark Preus]

Just as the title states. On a full wetsand and buff do you think the more time you put into the wetsanding then it would take less time to buff it out? Ive been thinking about this for the past couple of days

[dublifecrisis]

Paging Mike Phillips.....M. Phillips, Mr Phillips.

[David Fermani]

Yes. The finer the grit you go, the better the finish will be. If you can avoid a heavy compound by refining a sand scratch it will make polishing much easier. There are sanding systems out there that only require a mild polish to finish because the sandpaper you finish with actually creates gloss.

[Lasthope05]

Yes. The finer the grit you go, the better the finish will be. If you can avoid a heavy compound by refining a sand scratch it will make polishing much easier. There are sanding systems out there that only require a mild polish to finish because the sandpaper you finish with actually creates gloss.

+1 The 3M 3000 grit Trizact and Mirka 4000 grit sandpaper are great examples of this. They produce a finish so fine that it looks like actual haze and not standing scratches.

[Mark Preus]

+1 The 3M 3000 grit Trizact and Mirka 4000 grit sandpaper are great examples of this. They produce a finish so fine that it looks like actual haze and not standing scratches.

Yeah I have the 3m Trizact system and it says it can be finished out with the spot finishing polish it came with

[David Fermani]

The Micro-Mesh system goes all the way to 12,000 grit.

[ASPHALT ROCKET]

The Micro-Mesh system goes all the way to 12,000 grit.

I use that stuff when I polish my woodworking.

[Rsurfer]

I use that stuff when I polish my woodworking.

Didn't know you did woodworking...how about a rocking chair for the old man.

[ASPHALT ROCKET]

Didn't know you did woodworking...how about a rocking chair for the old man.

After I finishing making a rocking horse for my nephew, should be done in the next few weeks or so.

[Mike Phillips]

Paging Mike Phillips.....M. Phillips, Mr Phillips.

Sorry for the delay... went offline about 4:30pm for a behind the scenes project...


The old school way, which is the way most body shops still work, is to sand with low grits and then chop out their sanding scratches using a heavy compound with a wool pad on a rotary buffer. Hard to believe in this day and age of finer grit finishing papers that some shops finish at #1500 and then start compounding but that is within the norms of the refinishing industry, it's even worse in the Fiberglas and Mold Release industries.

That's how I was taught to do it back in the early 1980's and since that's how I was taught that's how I started out.

When I went to work for Meguiar's in 1988, the primary job I did was to call on body shops and teach the Meguiar's "system approach", not make sales calls showing a couple of products. The system started with the Nikken Finishing Papers, not "sanding" papers. And just to make a long story short, my job was the same thing I do today, and that's

Education


I would try to teach guys to spend more time upfront during the sanding step to take the extra step to finish-out at #2000 with a quality, Unigrit design paper and this would mean they could use less aggressive compounds to remove their sanding marks and this would,

• Generate less heat over a shorter period of time
• Induce less swirls into the paint
• Leave more paint on the car
• Reduce wheeling time (using a rotary buffer)

It rarely worked with production shops but custom shops understood the value.

Here's a little story...
One time in Portland, Oregon, this would be around 1990, I called on a shop that primarily worked on and painted Porsche's. After explaining the system approach to the head painter, and also the guy that did most of the sanding and buffing, he pointed to a dark blue Porsche and said I painted that yesterday, lets test your sandpaper out right now.

I asked him what brand of wet/dry paper he was using and it was a name brand, major player paper in the refinishing industry. (Not 3M). I handed him a sheet of Nikken #2000 and asked him to place it into his bucket of water to soak for a few minutes. Then instead of me demonstrating, I challenged him to do it himself and he did.

I sanded the upper portion of the passenger's door with the competing paper by hand in #2000 grit, then in a section below he sanded using the Nikken #20000 grit paper.

After sanding two sections equally he grabbed his rotary buffer and compounded each section for an equal amount of time and then placed the rotary buffer on the ground, wiped the panel and inspected the results.

He pointed out all of the tracers in the section he sanded with his normal paper and commented how few tracers were left in the panel he sanded with the Nikken paper and then stood up, took his brand new sleeve of blank #2000 grit wet/dry sanding papers, walked over to a 55 gallon drum used for garbage and as dropped the new sleeve of paper into the garbage, he said

"I don't have this kind of time to waste"

(Exact quote)

End of story...

That was a morning call for me and set the pace for the rest of the day. While most shop calls weren't that dramatic, for "custom" and high-end shops, shop calls did follow that type of pattern. The painter at that shop wanted to purchase some papers right then and there, but I wasn't a salesman, my job wasn't selling, it was training. I had him call his local PBE Store and order some from them but I did leave him enough samples to last for that car.


Personally? I would invest more time upfront in the sanding process refining my sanding marks to a very shallow depth and this will always make the buff-out process faster, with less heat to the paint while leaving more paint on the car.