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  1. #1
    Mike Phillips
    Guest

    Griots Garage BOSS Finishing Papers- Reduce Orange Peel - Review by Mike Phillips

    Griots Garage BOSS Finishing Papers- Reduce Orange Peel - Review by Mike Phillips







    You know a car wax company is serious when they add a wet sanding paper to their line of products.

    Why?

    Because wet sanding is serious stuff.

    This also means this company not only has a COMPLETE line from A to Z but they can go head to head with traditional companies that cater to the body shop world. Most car wax companies cater to the consumer ore enthusiast world, their products are traditionally made for and targeted at the retail market. Nothing wrong this this but it is a specific demographic group of people that is extremely opposite of the needs of the body shop or fresh custom paint world.


    Griot's has crossed the line with the introduction of the Nikken Finishing Papers to their already robust line. Griot's could now call on body shops and offer a system approach that includes body shop safe compounds and polishes. And more important, the abrasive technology used for the finishing papers and also in their BOSS compounds and polishes is top shelf. While not all body shops are focused on using the best compounds and polishes on the market as evident by the swirled out messes we see in the blogosphere all the time, there are some body shops that do want quality abrasive technology and they can get that with Griot's and their now complete system that includes,

    * Wet sanding papers --> Technically these are finishing papers not sanding papers, the difference is in the extreme high quality of the abrasive size and placement over the paper

    * Compounds

    * Polishes


    Because of my friendship with Bill Stuart (The Absorber), I know just enough about the Nikken Finishing Papers to be dangerous. Suffice to say, these are an electronics grade finishing paper, NOT an automotive grade wet/dry sandpaper. The primary benefits are,

    1. Uniform particle size
    2. Uniform particle placement
    3. 100% fill over the entire sheet of paper
    4. Latex impregnated paper that won't fall apart even after years of soaking in water
    5. Longer lasting
    6. Faster cutting
    7. Leaves more paint on the car
    8. Sanding marks buff out faster and easier
    9. Reduced risk for tracers




    The above is just off the top of my head, I'm probably forgetting a few...


    The introduction of a line of sanding finishing papers to the Griot's line is not surprising since in the last few years Richard Griot, in his wisdom has added three hardcore car guys that area also former employees at Meguiar's.

    1. Jeff Brown
    2. Rod Kraft
    3. Doug Hodge




    Each one of these guys has forgotten more about car detailing than I can remember. They are as the saying goes... the real deal....


    It makes sense that Griot's would add a super high quality finishing paper to their line of top notch product BECAUSE Griot's goes after not just Joe Consumer, (nothing wrong with Joe Consumer), they go after the hard core serious car owners that do things like buy and restore their own cars, in other words, hard core do-it-yourselfers.

    What does this mean and how does this tie into wet sanding?

    Great question, and here's the tie-in. Hardcore car guys do things like purchase neglected Mustangs and Chevelle out of garages and then fix them up, restore them or hot rod them and at some point in the process these types of cars get RE-PAINTED and as most of you probably know, most re-paints come with ORANGE PEEL and most hardcore car guys are not going to be satisfied with an orange peel finish. So what does a hardcore DO-IT-YOURSEVER car guy do?

    He learns how to wetsand, cut and buff.


    He learns by reading a forum like AutogeekOnline.net that if you want it done right you have to do it yourself and the reason for this is because most body shops don't and are not going to use high quality, more costly sandpapers like the Griot's Nikken Finishing Papers but instead they're going to use low cost, wet/dry sand papers that "yes" - will remove the orange peel but in the process will remove too much paint, (that they were just paid to spray onto the car), and if the buffing isn't done perfect they're going to leave behind tracers.

    Most body shops are not sanding and buffing shops their collision shops, they specialize in fixing damaged body panels and spraying paint. Sanding and buffing is an art form. It's also something that takes TIME and quality products to do it right and that's not what your average body shop is about.


    So hardcore car guys search for the right products and the right information to use the products and then do-it-themselves.



    Uniform particle size i.e. uniform abrasive grains







    100% fill = Uniform particle placement over the entire sheet of paper







    The above is the back story... now lets take a look at the Griot's Garage BOSS Finishing Papers.




  2. #2
    Mike Phillips
    Guest

    Re: Griots Garage BOSS Finishing Papers- Reduce Orange Peel - Review by Mike Phillips

    Continued....


    Removing orange peel and reducing orange peel

    These are two very different things.


    Removing orange peel
    Removing orange peel is the process of sanding a panel completely flat and then removing 100% of your sanding marks to create a mirror finish. When a surface is completely flat it reflects images like a mirror.

    D.O.I.
    The flatter the surface the higher the D.O.I. or Distinction of Image. Hardcore car guys what a mirror finish on their show cars and/or even their toys. With custom paint jobs on cars they restore and/or hotrod, this is a lot easier to do because there's planning that goes on behind the build. Planning means paying the painter to spray extra clear onto the car so there's not only enough paint to wet sand, cut and buff but down the road there's enough paint on the car for future compounding and polishing. For example if a bird leaves a bird dropping on the hood you want enough paint on the car AFTER wet sanding and buffing to have plenty of film-build to safely remove the etching in the paint without going through the clear coat and exposing the basecoat. Or other accidents, like accidental scratches, scrapes and scuffs. Life happens and you want some extra paint.


    Factory paint is both thin and hard
    Factory paint is only around 2 mils thin, that's thinner than your average post-it note. So I always meet guys that just bought a brand new Corvette and of course, they want the orange peel removed to max out the D.O.I. and give their Vette that show car look but most of these guys I meet don't know how thin the paint is on their car. They also don't know simple things like,

    1. Wet sanding removes paint.
    2. Compounding removes paint.
    3. Polishing removes a little paint



    And when the paint on your brand new Corvette (or fill in the blank), is thinner than a post-it note, there's simply not enough paint to sand and buff safely. Can it be done? Yes. But it does require more time and of course, high quality products like finishing papers instead of sanding papers and just as important, compound and polishes that use great abrasive technology. Even still - it's risky. It's easy to sand and buff a large flat panel... it's when guys get around corners, edges, tight spots and raised body lines that they get into trouble and end up either sanding through or buffing through the top layer of paint. Ouch.


    Factory paint is fully dried and cured --> hard
    Factory paint is baked on while the car is travelling down the assembly line. It's also fully dried, cured and set-up by the time you take possession of the car. This is normal. What it means though is that while sanding factory paint is easy, (sanding is putting scratches in the paint), the tricky part is getting them 100% out of the paint and this becomes more difficult the harder the paint.


    New paint job by your local body shop
    Custom paint jobs offer a window of time before they are fully dry, cured and hardened. This gives a person a little more forgiveness when buffing out their sanding marks.


    Reducing orang peel
    Reducing orange peel is actually more difficult than removing orange peel because if you sand too much you will remove the orange peel, not leave any behind.

    The idea and goal behind reducing orange peel is to make any body panels that have been repaired and/or replaced and then painted by a local body shop match the factory orange peel.

    When it comes to reducing orange peel the idea is to lightly sand and in some cases lightly scuff the tops of the hills and valleys and then buffing out your sanding marks. The goal is to flatten the orange peel a little but not remove it 100%

    Keep in mind,

    1. Wet sanding removes paint.
    2. Compounding removes paint.
    3. Polishing removes a little paint



    So in most cases you're better off to understand and the compound and polish and then check your results versus get too aggressive. The reason why is simple and that's because if there's no going back if you make the paint too perfect.


    Make sense?



  3. #3
    Mike Phillips
    Guest

    Re: Griots Garage BOSS Finishing Papers- Reduce Orange Peel - Review by Mike Phillips

    Continued...




    2 new doors and new paint

    One of our forum members contacted me about sanding and buffing the fresh paint on the doors of his Mercedes-Benz after the two passenger side doors were replaced and then painted at the Mercedes-Benz dealership. He said they did a good job of replacing the doors and matching the paint but after reading our forum for 3+ years he didn't trust them to sand and buff without turning a mole heel into a mountain. He reached out to me and after hearing his plight I agreed to lend him a hand.

    Plus with Griot's launching their new finishing papers, I needed a real-world project.


    Pictured below is his car. I've placed some cardboard under the area we're going to sand to keep the sanding slurry off the floor and thus make clean-up fast and easy. I'm lazy plus we have large flat chunks of cardboard in the warehouse.





    Uber careful
    You don't have to have separate buckets for different levels of sand paper or sanding discs but if you're the kind of person that will take any precaution possible to avoid hassles like in this case, tracers, then here's a tip...

    Use dedicated buckets for each grit of finishing paper to avoid any particle cross contamination. Be sure to mark your buckets like you see below so you keep things sorted.





    Place your Griot's Garage Boss Finishing Papers into a bucket with clean water and a few drops of car wash soap to soak approximately 30 minutes before use.












    Grit Guard Insets
    Here's another tip... place a Grit Guard Insert inside of each bucket, you can even go nuts and place 2 Grit Guard Inserts inside of each bucket. This will elevate our papers off the bottom of the bucket where stray abrasive particles that are dislodged off the paper will fall to the bottom.




    The papers will roll up, this is normal.





  4. #4
    Mike Phillips
    Guest

    Re: Griots Garage BOSS Finishing Papers- Reduce Orange Peel - Review by Mike Phillips

    Continued....


    Didn't take a lot of pictures showing the process... sorry about that but sometimes I need to simply get in and get out. It's time consuming to play both the detailer part and the photographer part.


    Here's the paint before sanding. When the owner arrived, I was expecting the orange peel to be a LOT worse from his description. This is also why I dunked #2000, #2500 and #3000 finishing papers in buckets of water - I though we would be doing a lot more sanding. After inspecting the factory pant and the re-paint we ended up only using #2500. In fact, the #2000 and the #3000 finishing papers are still in the buckets soaking and because they are a latex rubber impregnated paper they simply do not fall apart like most inexpensive wet/dry papers.





    This picture is cropped out of the above and here you can see the wavy looking image reflections caused by the orange peel.





    Here's just lightly scuffing the panels. This is trickier than it looks.












    In the below two pictures, someone was walking into the garage and the sunlight peeking in through the door helps to show the level of knock-down to the orange peel.






    Machine sanded with the RUPES Nano IBrid and the RUPES #3000 sanding discs.






  5. #5
    Mike Phillips
    Guest

    Re: Griots Garage BOSS Finishing Papers- Reduce Orange Peel - Review by Mike Phillips

    Continued...


    After lightly sanding or scuffing the tops of the orange peel, next up is removing the sanding marks. A question I get asked all the time is,


    Can I use an orbital polisher to remove sanding marks?

    The answer is yes - kind of.


    Any tool that can abrade and remove paint is going to remove sanding marks... the question becomes... how much time do you have on your hands?

    The fastest way to remove 100% of the sanding marks is with a wool pad, a rotary buffer and a quality compound. Since we just brought in the new Jescar compound and polish, that's what we tested out with the FLEX tools to remove the sanding marks.

    Below you can see our Test Spot. That's Frank in the picture but I dialed in the process and even though the paint is only a few weeks old I found it to be more on the hard side than the soft side and even though we only used #2500 grit finishing papers it still took some effort to buff out 100% of the sanding marks.






    Here's the only after shots I took, we easily reduced the orange peel and in fact may have removed too much. Just goes to show it's trickier than most people think.







    This is compounding and polishing only. The owner planned to apply a ceramic paint coating to match the LSP on the rest of the car.

    [b]http://www.autogeekonline.net/gallery/data/3398/Griots_Finishing_036.JPG[/img]




  6. #6
    Mike Phillips
    Guest

    Re: Griots Garage BOSS Finishing Papers- Reduce Orange Peel - Review by Mike Phillips

    Continued...



    Here's the tools, pads and products behind the method to the madness. I would say most people don't own all of the below to correctly and properly tackle any wet sanding project let alone a small wet sanding project. So if you plan on doing any type of wet sanding, be sure to gear-up for the task at hand or you'll end up in garage lacking the basics and then you can either place an order with Autogeek to get what you need or you can drive all over town with your fingers crossed someone actually carries good stuff.








    Wool pad on a FLEX PE14





    6.5" LC Hybrid Orange Foam Cutting Pad on a FLEX 3401 to remove holograms left by the wool pad on a rotary buffer






    6.5" LC ThinPro Black Finishing Pad on the FLEX XFE7 to perfect the paint after heaving compounding with the FLEX 3401

    (Text book example of starting with the BEAST and finishing out with the Finisher)





    For the tight areas like just in front of the rear view mirror we used the RUPES iBrid to machine sand








    It's vitally important to WORK CLEAN when doing this type of work and that means keeping your foam buffing pads and your wool buffing pads clean so be sure to have both a foam pad brush and a wool pad spur on hand.





    Jescar Correcting Compound and Micro Finishing Polish plus my handy-dandy SCANGRIP Sunmatch for inspecting our work after the fact.




    We used 2 sheets of #2500, one for Frank and one for me. We could have easily done the work with one sheet but I wanted both of us sanding to knock this job out faster plus I know Frank likes sanding.






    Final thoughts...

    If you're going to hand sand, start with the best finishing paper on the market. Anything less means you'll be fighting yourself and you'll risk removing too much paint.




    On Autogeek.com

    Griots Garage BOSS Finishing Papers











  7. #7
    Mike Phillips
    Guest

    Re: Griots Garage BOSS Finishing Papers- Reduce Orange Peel - Review by Mike Phillips

    Continued....


    Griot's BOSS Finishing papers are available in sleeves of 25 papers.

    If you're working on factory paint, stick with #2000 grit and higher. Really safe is sticking with #2500 if you understand just how think factory paint is. Leave the #800 and #1500 for guys working on custom paint jobs with experience.
















  8. #8
    Super Member
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    Re: Griots Garage BOSS Finishing Papers- Reduce Orange Peel - Review by Mike Phillips

    Wow!! What a spectacular review!! Thanks Mike!!

    I see DA sanding much more than hand sanding. I'm a bit surprised why Griot's went the hand sanding route. Then again, I'm not a pro with sanding.
    '03 Corvette Z06

  9. #9
    Mike Phillips
    Guest

    Re: Griots Garage BOSS Finishing Papers- Reduce Orange Peel - Review by Mike Phillips

    Quote Originally Posted by WRAPT C5Z06 View Post

    Wow!! What a spectacular review!! Thanks Mike!!

    Thanks, I kind of feel it's underwhelming as far as reviews go.... but I have 3 wet sanding projects coming up so I'll try to have an extra person to take good pictures and some video.


    Quote Originally Posted by WRAPT C5Z06 View Post

    I see DA sanding much more than hand sanding. I'm a bit surprised why Griot's went the hand sanding route.

    It's less expensive the purchasing sanding discs for machine sanding. It does require more skill, that his hand sanding requires more skill than machine sanding.


    And of course... most people already own a hand or two...

    Not everyone owns a air DA or an electric DA.



  10. #10
    Super Member fly07sti's Avatar
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    Re: Griots Garage BOSS Finishing Papers- Reduce Orange Peel - Review by Mike Phillips

    Nice review Mike. You and Frank did a great job of bringing that OP down. As you have said, I 100% agree that matching OP is much harder than totally removing it. What's great about hand/block sanding is not having any da pig tails. Again, great job.

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