Wetsanding - 1947 Ford Coupe Streetrod - Remove Orange Peel by Mike Phillips

[Mike Phillips]

Wetsanding - 1947 Ford Coupe Streetrod - Remove Orange Peel by Mike Phillips


Orange Peel in Car Paint






Orange Peel and Holograms

So my friend Joe gets a hold of me, asks me if I can wetsand his custom 1947 Ford Coupe Streetrod to remove the orange peel and also the holograms. Of course I say, sure!

When Joe arrived, I took a couple of pictures to show the holograms in the finish.


Word Definition

Holograms - A specific scratch pattern caused by the misuse of a rotary polisher.



Using overhead bright sunlight to capture holograms

When you look at the roof on this 1947 Ford Coupe besides seeing blue paint you can also see swirls around the reflection of the sun PLUS what appear to be some wispy lines. The wispy lines are HOLOGRAMS and they mimic the direction a rotary polisher was moved over the paint.






Here's a different photo of the same area only I've cropped out the majority of the roof to focus just on the visible hologram scratches.






The hologram scratches are on all the body panels but a tick difficult to see as they are either not very deep or there's wax masking them.






Orange Peel

We've moved the car inside and did a waterless wash to remove any dirt and dust.






The hood was recently repainted and while the color match is spot on - there's a lot of excess orange peel in the paint.






Orange peel is the term used to describe the way paint can look from both the factory as well as re-paint during collision work or custom paint.






The textured surface resembles the peel on an orange thus the term orange peel.






The sides of the hood had severe orange peel. You can see from the picture below - the worse the orange peel the more reflections seen in the paint are disfigured or mottled.






Before sanding we taped-off all the chrome and stainless steel trim. We also removed the hood ornament






Here's some pictures showing the progress while we were hand sanding the hood.






At the top of the picture below the majority of the orange peel has been removed by sanding the paint flat. Think of orange peel as hills and valleys. When using a hard block or a soft block, the face of the block keeps the face of the sanding paper flat. By doing this, the sandpaper first sands the high point or the tops of the "hills" on the paint. The goal is to sand the paint until the highest portions of the orange peel, (the hills), are level with the lowest portions of the orange peel, (the valleys).






In the below picture, the speckled looking area is where portions of the hills have been sanded but not enough to level the surface. The shiny areas are the valleys.






We continued sanding towards the front of the hood until the entire hood was sanded flat.








Machine sanding to refine hand sanding marks plus refine the rest of the paint on all the other body panels.










The reason the hood looks different is because after hand sanding and machine sanding I wiped-off the sanding slurry residue before moving on to the rest of the car.






If you look carefully, you can see my test spot in the center of the passenger side of the hood.





Rotary Step - Sorry, no pictures.



Machine polishing

After the rotary work to remove the sanding marks, the entire car was machine polished using BLACKFIRE One Step. This acted as both a polish and a sealant. This is a cheater technique I use on cured paint to remove the holograms while leaving the paint sealed at the same time.






Because the BLACKFIRE One Step wipes off so easy after it's fully dried, you can leave it on the car as you work around the car and wipe it off all at once when you're completely done. Besides wiping off easy, by leaving it on you can easily see where you've buffed and where you still need to buff.






Just for fun I left a square section of machine sanded paint in the middle of the trunk lid to show the difference between sanded and machine and the final high gloss, swirl free results created by the BF One Step.






Here's Joe helping to wipe off the BLACKFIRE Fire One Step...






Here's the final results...














Here's the sanding tools, polishers and products used...


Hand Sanding with a soft block to remove orange peel and flatten the paint.





Machine sanding - Removing surface texture and leveling holograms





Rotary Polisher, compound and wool pad to remove sanding marks...





BF AIO with the BEAST and a foam polishing pad to remove holograms and seal the paint.




Total time
From start to finish we knocked this out in around 8 hours. It helped that all the body on old coupes like this are made up of gentle flowing curved body panels instead of squared-up panels with lots of raised edges and body lines.



On Autogeek.com


Hand sanding

Meguiar's 2000 Grit Sand Paper - 25 Sheets - $33.00

Meguiar's Sanding Pad E7200 - $6.00

36 Ounce Detail Bottle - $6.00 - Clean water supply for sanding. Also used for machine sanding.




Machine sanding

3M Trizact Hookit 6 Inch Foam Discs P3000 - 02085 - $108.00

Meguiars Soft Buff DBP6 DA Polisher 6 inch Backing Plate - $25.00

Griots Garage BOSS 6.5 inch Innerflex Pad - $16.00

Porter Cable 7424XP Dual Action Polisher - 150.00




Removing sanding marks

BLACKFIRE Compound 32 oz - $60.00

FLEX PE-150 Cordless Rotary Polisher - $600.00

6 inch Hook & Loop Rotary Flexible Backing Plate - $20.00

RUPES Twisted Natural Wool Pad - 6.5 Inch - $20.00




Removing holograms and sealing the paint

BLACKFIRE One Step 32 oz. - $40.00

The BEAST - $435.99

6.5 inch Lake Country Force Hybrid White Polishing Pad - $11.00



Thanks Joe for trusting me with your really cool 1947 Ford Coupe!

[Rsurfer]

Awesome job and write up Mike.

[Mike Phillips]

Awesome job and write up Mike.

Thanks Ron.

Write-up is kind of wimpy, could have used more pictures showing more of the process.

[2black1s]

Looks like an enjoyable project.

It's been a long time since I have done a full sand and polish job... But the satisfaction from this type of project when finished is as good as it gets.

8 hours? Not me! A job like that is at least a few days for me.

[Mike Phillips]

But the satisfaction from this type of project when finished is as good as it gets.

It's always rewarding to meet someone with a cool car that needs help and then fix the problem and get the car looking right.

8 hours? Not me! A job like that is at least a few days for me.

I agree with this type of work, more time is better but keep in mind, most of the sanding was with #3000 Trizact, very very safe. If I remember correctly, except for the repainted hood, the car had previously been sanded and buffed but there were holograms left in the paint and other minor surface imperfections. So to really get it right we soft blocked the hood and then machine sanded the entire car, then buffed and polished.

I talked to the owner yesterday, he's going to be back in town in a few weeks and get the car out of storage. When I get a chance I'll take a look at the finish to make sure it's still looks like it did when it left Autogeek's garage.