How to remove wetsanding scratches by hand - FG 400

[Mike Phillips]

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...

[KillaCam]

Wow that's impressive. How long did it take you?

[axel06]

wow mike your so amazzzing hugs and kisses

[Hoytman]

Wow that's impressive. How long did it take you?

You beat me to it...

[Mike Phillips]

To actually rub the scratches out to the point I knew I could chemically strip the paint and see no more sanding marks?

About 15 minutes and a lot of passion behind the pad...

I'm definitely a machine guy...

[Mike Phillips]

***Update***

FG 400 came in handy for a couple of places where we needed to remove the bulk of some sanding marks before using the 3" wool buffing pad for the 1969 AMX project in Nebraska.

We have a ton of pictures to go through so stay tuned...











Removing scratches by hand does take good technique plus a little passion behind the pad...

[ken tuep]

I always hated hand compounding after doing a wetsand. Fresh paint definately makes it easier. Compounding around Drip rails are in my nightmares.

[Mike Phillips]

I always hated hand compounding after doing a wetsand. Fresh paint definitely makes it easier. Compounding around Drip rails are in my nightmares.

Ben removed the drip rails on the 1969 AMX, when I find a good picture I'll post it...

[Mike Phillips]

***Update***

The Time Lapse Video for the 1969 AMX Wetsand, Cut & Buff Project has been uploaded to YouTube and you can watch it here,


Wetsanding a car from start to finish - Time Lapse Video


Here's Yancy setting up the GoPro Camera to capture this project from start to finish...

[sansa]

To actually rub the scratches out to the point I knew I could chemically strip the paint and see no more sanding marks?

About 15 minutes and a lot of passion behind the pad...

I'm definitely a machine guy...

Why not using a wool pad? would it speed the process?