and dries quickly to a dull sheen. After it dries, follow with a couple of coats of clear. Do not sand either the base or clear between coats.
After all the masking is removed, the painted and cleared area looks glossy like this, requiring no rub out unless you want to. But now it’s time to rub out the old paint on the rest of the car.
On our test car, I started with a couple different kinds of cleaner-waxes, but they weren’t strong enough. So I tried using a couple different brands, and different strengths (super fine, fine, then mild abrasive) of “de-oxidizer” or “finish renewer” liquids, by hand. It was getting better, but I still wasn’t getting through the old hazy tarnish. Trying these products with a buffer and wool pad still didn’t cut it. So I got out the 3M rubbing compound with a “cutting” buffer pad, and that did it, surprisingly without going through the clear. Obviously (as we see in the rub-out chapter) this had to be followed with sealer/glaze and then a good coat of hand wax.
Numerous “paint rejuvenators,” “de-oxidizers,” or even “swirl removers” are available from the wax purveyors. Try them out to see what works best for you. For this job you don’t want a “non-abrasive” formula; you need a mild abrasive, if not more.
Depending on your paint’s condition, you could hand-rub it out with a mild abrasive.
If the clear is starting to craze or check, it’s usually impossible to fix without repainting. But this case responded pretty well to some hand rubbing and waxing, as seen in the second photo.
Now here’s my big caveat—or rationalization—for this section: It’s a can’t-lose deal. Of course you want to buff out the paint to a like-new finish without breaking through the clear coat, or whatever the top layer is. If you can, great. You’re lucky, and you’ve saved a lot of work and expense. But if you do buff right through—so what? Now you have to repaint the car, which is what we really started out to do, anyway, right? You haven’t really lost anything. The car only needs minor sanding at this point, and then you can mask it and shoot it. Or maybe you can get by just spotting it in.
Spot it in
Speaking of clear coats, most new cars of the past couple of decades came with them, even over solid colors, like black (which seems strange to me). If the paint is crazing or peeling, obviously the clear coat is first to go. You’ve seen it. It looks like your skin when it’s peeling after a bad sunburn. When the paint is in this condition, no amount of polishing or rubbing is going to save it. If it’s bad enough, sand down (or strip) the whole car and repaint it, including a new base coat and clear coat. You can’t just spray a new clear coat over a peeled one. The edges where it peeled will show.
However, on our test car for this chapter, the peeled clear was confined to panels separated from the rest of the car (the tailgate and the front and rear bumpers). Therefore, they could be sanded down, masked off and sprayed with a new base coat, and then cleared, without having to “blend” the paint into any of the rest on the body. Given this, I simply ordered the color by code at the paint store, rather than having it “matched” to the now-slightly-faded original paint elsewhere on the car. They were close enough in color and separated by body lines.
Incidentally, you may not realize it, but many brand new cars (more so in the past; they try to protect them better these days) get damaged in shipping, or even on the lot, and get spot-repainted at the dealer’s before they are sold new. I don’t know exactly how the factory cures its paint jobs, but factory paint is invariably more durable than any kind of repaint. That was the case with our sample car. The front bumper was apparently repainted by the dealer and the tailgate was repaired and repainted by a bodyshop. These were the first areas to peel. The rest of the factory finish, even after 12-plus years outside, took plenty of rubbing and polished up nicely.
When you’re spotting-in a paint job with a clear coat, it is relatively easy. If most of the clear coat is lifting, sand it all down, repaint the entire panel for full and even coverage with new base coat, and then clear coat the entire panel. If only a small portion of the clear coat is bad, or if the area has scrapes or other small damage, you can sand down the affected area (into the good clear coat), spot-in new base coat to cover the damage (again, spraying over at least a small portion of the good clear coat), then clear coat the entire panel. This works fine even if you have to do a little bodywork and priming in the damaged area to start—as long as you fully cover all primer, and any of its overspray, with base coat. You can even try spotting-in the clear coat—again, spraying beyond the base-coated area and any of its overspray—and rubbing out the junction of the old and new clear coats. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t. But, hey, if it doesn’t (if you can see a line or edge between the new and old clear coats once it’s buffed out), simply scuff down and reshoot the whole panel with a full clear coat. Depending on the type of car you’re restoring, your proclivities, and how well you can get the clear coat to lay down and gloss out, you can either leave it as-sprayed and start waxing it regularly along with the rest of the car, or you can color-sand and rub it out.
You also might be surprised how many scrapes and abrasions on your car are less than skin deep, and can be removed or significantly repaired by some rubbing with compound.
On this car I decided to try 3M Super Duty compound to start, which is about as coarse as you’d want to use on anything. Since it comes in a jug, it helps to put some in a squirt bottle for ease of application. Then I used a cutting pad on my power buffer to do the whole car. This is extreme; you might want to start with something less abrasive. See Chapter 11 for more details on rubbing out paint, old or new.
If your car doesn’t have a clear coat, spotting-in is more difficult. With metallics or modern paints with pearl added, it is nearly impossible to spot-in a portion of a body panel, rub it out, and have it blend in with the former finish so you can’t tell. About the only recourse here is to repaint a full panel separated from the rest of the body by seams or trim. Another possibility here is to spot-in areas that need it, and then clear coat the whole car. This is unusual, but certainly possible.
If your vehicle is painted in a one-step, non-metallic color such as red, yellow, or black, spotting it in and rubbing out the area is usually easy, particularly if the paint is fresh (i.e., you got a run while you were doing the paint job, a bug landed in it, some paint pulled off with the tape, whatever). Just sand the area with 360-grit until the dirt, bug, or rough edge is gone, repaint the area, and rub it out. If you saved some of the original paint, this also works on an
