2

So I tried to paint the fender on my "beater" car. No requirements for it to look perfect and I did it mostly for learning. So the end result is not the best because there is no shine for the clear coat. It is very muddy/foggy and has a matte feel to it, I wouldn't even call it orange peel. As I understand my mistake was doing that on a rainy/humid day. So the question here is what would be the best way to fix it?

  1. Should I get straight to 1500-2000 grit, wet-sand it and try to polish that? I got a feeling that that won't do any good because the clear coat itself is gone bad and looks like there is no way to work with that.
  2. Or should I take some 800 grit sandpaper, try to wet-sand the clear coat down, then wet-sand with 1500 and re-apply clear coat, this time in better weather conditions?

foggy matte clear coat

Chris
  • 21
  • 1
  • 1
  • 2

1 Answers1

1

Humidity is the bane of clearcoat! And 99/100 times you're looking at option 2.. there is a slight caveat though - if it's a case of the top layer coat getting a bit milky and it's not too widespread you can sometimes do a bit of a rescue job with a heatgun (the cloudiness is mainly trapped moisture) and then doing some wet-sanding to bring the finish up. I wouldn't hold high hopes here though - that's more for ones where it got a bit humid towards the end as the clearcoat was curing and it sounds as though the whole thing was humid from start to finish.

But given this is a beater and a bit of a learning experience if you've got a heat gun handy then I'd suggest trying that on a small area first, if you see some worthwhile improvement in clouding then you can go for it. Otherwise you're back to old reliable - strip the clearcoat off and try again on a dry day.

motosubatsu
  • 10,632
  • 1
  • 24
  • 42