Clearcoat repair without sanding
Posted: Feb 28, 2015 4:18 PM
This might be in the wrong spot, but maybe not. It's about an E39, but it's paint and it could be on an E28, in any case it's not even factory paint, but not every 30 year old car still has original paint. Regardless, here goes, it may or may not work on your car.
The old wagon, a '00 with 253K on it had crappy paint that drove my wife nuts and it was her car. No place seemed affordable, at least with the value of the car being what it is. So after I bought the new one, the 02 touring with 83K I set out to make it more presentable to sell. Sanding is out of the question, clearcoat is thick and hard, color is thin and soft, once you go thru the clear you're thru the color into the primer. I mic'd out the clear at about .0015" and I'd estimate the color at .0002. But I've worked with a razor blade before on furniture and even cars a little bit scraping paint off so I thought I'd give it a try even though I'd tried before and it didn't seem to want to cooperate. Here's what I started with, not very pretty. Actually this was 6 or 8 months ago, it was somewhat worse than the pic.
The scraping process is just that, using just the right angle with the blade to catch the clearcoat but not the basecoat. Sometimes it kind of chips off in little tiny pieces like this.
Other times it will sheet off like this.
It's really a two hand operation, one to push the blade and the other to hold the angle. With the hands of an eye surgeon and the patience of Job you will still have gouges. Dozens if not hundreds. Kind of like nicks, the pic is a close up it's not really all that big.
Here I'm making progress.
More progress, the hood is pretty much done, and it's a big hood.
Actually I did have to do some sanding and it wasn't perfect. I could use 600 super lightly as long as it was relatively flat, but it cut thru the color into the primer instantly on an edge. I mostly used 1000, then 1500 then 2000. I wasn't able to get it perfect, I had sanding streaks. But it was sort of ok. Smooth and ready for paint. The bumper which I feared thinking I would gouge it up even more being soft plastic came out the best, both stripping and painting, it came out great.
And the overall nose came out pretty good, the white area in the upper right of the pic is just a cloud reflection.
It is now fully presentable. Not great by any stretch, but presentable. Some rough spots where I sprayed it a little dry, the base wasn't perfect, some places I couldn't help but have a hard edge between old and new and there is a color difference, but it's 10X better. Nobody will mistake it for factory paint job, but it's more like a 10 footer. I've got a spray gun, but in the neighborhood I'm in I only briefly tried it before deciding it was just way too much and just used a Preval sprayer. Real PPG Delstar auto paint, no rattlecan stuff off the shelf at Walmart and it would have been better if I'd had more patience and waited for the wind to die down, but overall it came out well. It needs paint but it's presentable again.
More on the scraping. Some areas were easy and I could use the full width of the blade. Many fought me and I was using maybe 3/8 of an inch of bite on the razor blade. Some were like pulling teeth and others just weren't happening at all. I'm not really sure why, some easy hadn't really had much sun exposure and some hard had. And vise versa. I'm sure this won't work on everything, but it clearly worked here. It took me less time than it would have to sand it off and turned out to be a cheap repair. Again, not great, but presentable. YMMV.
The old wagon, a '00 with 253K on it had crappy paint that drove my wife nuts and it was her car. No place seemed affordable, at least with the value of the car being what it is. So after I bought the new one, the 02 touring with 83K I set out to make it more presentable to sell. Sanding is out of the question, clearcoat is thick and hard, color is thin and soft, once you go thru the clear you're thru the color into the primer. I mic'd out the clear at about .0015" and I'd estimate the color at .0002. But I've worked with a razor blade before on furniture and even cars a little bit scraping paint off so I thought I'd give it a try even though I'd tried before and it didn't seem to want to cooperate. Here's what I started with, not very pretty. Actually this was 6 or 8 months ago, it was somewhat worse than the pic.
The scraping process is just that, using just the right angle with the blade to catch the clearcoat but not the basecoat. Sometimes it kind of chips off in little tiny pieces like this.
Other times it will sheet off like this.
It's really a two hand operation, one to push the blade and the other to hold the angle. With the hands of an eye surgeon and the patience of Job you will still have gouges. Dozens if not hundreds. Kind of like nicks, the pic is a close up it's not really all that big.
Here I'm making progress.
More progress, the hood is pretty much done, and it's a big hood.
Actually I did have to do some sanding and it wasn't perfect. I could use 600 super lightly as long as it was relatively flat, but it cut thru the color into the primer instantly on an edge. I mostly used 1000, then 1500 then 2000. I wasn't able to get it perfect, I had sanding streaks. But it was sort of ok. Smooth and ready for paint. The bumper which I feared thinking I would gouge it up even more being soft plastic came out the best, both stripping and painting, it came out great.
And the overall nose came out pretty good, the white area in the upper right of the pic is just a cloud reflection.
It is now fully presentable. Not great by any stretch, but presentable. Some rough spots where I sprayed it a little dry, the base wasn't perfect, some places I couldn't help but have a hard edge between old and new and there is a color difference, but it's 10X better. Nobody will mistake it for factory paint job, but it's more like a 10 footer. I've got a spray gun, but in the neighborhood I'm in I only briefly tried it before deciding it was just way too much and just used a Preval sprayer. Real PPG Delstar auto paint, no rattlecan stuff off the shelf at Walmart and it would have been better if I'd had more patience and waited for the wind to die down, but overall it came out well. It needs paint but it's presentable again.
More on the scraping. Some areas were easy and I could use the full width of the blade. Many fought me and I was using maybe 3/8 of an inch of bite on the razor blade. Some were like pulling teeth and others just weren't happening at all. I'm not really sure why, some easy hadn't really had much sun exposure and some hard had. And vise versa. I'm sure this won't work on everything, but it clearly worked here. It took me less time than it would have to sand it off and turned out to be a cheap repair. Again, not great, but presentable. YMMV.
