I had the use of the driveway today and with the car under the carport and I decided to try and tackle the paintwork on the roof. With car being22 years old the paintwork has it's fair share of chips and scratches all over as I'm sure those of you with these older cars will understand. I have posted somewhere on here about the roof before and how after a good machine polish it still looked awful. And there is no way to get the paintwork to original condition as where there are hundreds of tiny chips around the lower parts this will require new paint, and as it's my daily it's not going for a full respray. So, I have to live with what I have and try to improve it the best I can. For the roof only that meant breaking out the wet 'n' dry sandpaper.
WTF?
Yes, wet 'n' dry sandpaper was used. And the fun bit is that I don't fully know the result yet as it went dark. Typical British weather!!
This is what I did, so for all you detailers out there please don't hammer me. First up was a good wash, a wipe over with a clean cloth and a good check and feel that there was nothing lumpy stuck in the lacquer. Oh, the lacquer. I read up that it was probably not to thick so I had to be careful. There are two marks on the roof where it seems to be missing but these are very small areas. I used 3000 grit paper and soaked it for 2 hours before use. I very lightly rubbed over the surface using water with a little detergent in it and it was obvious that the surface was very rough. I did one side at a time and wiped it down to check i'd not missed anywhere.
Upon checking it was clear that there were some areas where bird sh1t had eaten the lacquer and these needed to be sanded a little more. Everything cleaned and dried again it looked like a bad idea so out came the polisher. I used an intense cut foam pad and some heavy cut polish with a speed of 2 on the polisher. I went over all of the roof evenly and wiped off the polish. It was clear that it needed more work and with the pad now primed I used double the speed, a little more pressure and a tiny dab of polish for each section. It looked so much better over the whole roof so I wiped off the residue and went for a softer pad, softer polish and less pressure. Finally I used a soft pad and a finishing polish. It was getting a little dark by this time so I took a few photos and a video, rinsed the car off and went for fuel. When I got back it was completely dark but the roof was pretty much dry. I won't know the full results until I see it tomorrow in natural light but if it needs a bit more polishing I'll do it again but won't be going back to the sandpaper. The roof was in such poor condition that it looked like different paintwork from the rest of the car. If you look at the first photo that is the condition after a good wash, cutting polish and hand polish. It looked like someone had tried to respray lacquer over the original.
I'll post up some photos tomorrow taken in the daytime. Fingers crossed....
