How to Sand and Buff Clear Coat - 3M Sand & Polish System

one of the worst things you can have happen when you're painting a card is to get orange peel and or dust plex in your paint the problem is in a place like arizona where it's hot even if you do everything right if you have a good chance of getting a level orange peel like we've got on the car here but we're going to show you how to take this from the orange peel to a gorgeous looking paint job without having to start over [Music] now that we've shown you what the problem is which is very common when painting a car particularly at a high temperature arizona being hot a lot of the time as i said we're going to show you how to fix it first thing you'll notice and you saw it in the intro i'm wearing nitrile gloves reason i'm going to do that is because i'm going to wet sand this and in wet sanding it i am going to use water with dawn dish soap in it dawn dish soap at least for me will start to take my hands apart if i don't keep them covered so i'm going to wear gloves gloves therefore optional but i would think most people probably want to wear them you'll also notice down here i put a piece of tape i have not done a great job of putting the tape on that's not the point of the tape point of the tape is just to keep me from sanding on the tail light because that section is fine so we don't want to sand there and so we've got a piece of tape here this is just regular blue tape you get the hardware store now i'm going to start you through the process the first thing we're going to do is we're going to sand this surface with 1000 grit sandpaper so i'm going to grab that and we'll get going all right here we have a brand new piece a thousand grit sandpaper obviously you see it's 3m when it comes to sandpaper i tend to prefer 3m to everything it seems to be really the best thing compared to other brands particularly the brands coming out of china that have got no name on so i prefer 3m as a sandpaper i'm going to start with a brand new piece some people would tell you have to soak it for a while i've not found that to be necessary now i also have two different pads i use one this is a flexible but fairly hard rubber pad this is the side you would crunch your sandpaper against and you're going to use that side to actually rub on the vehicle this is a very soft one but it's very useful if you've got a lot of contour in something or you want to go around a corner like right in here that's really useful to use that type of pad you do not want to take your sandpaper and just sand with the sandpaper in your hand the end result is going to be all waves so you can't do that so don't do it i also have my ancient cake pan here it gets a little rusty and stuff but it works really good for dipping this sandpaper and getting the water you use a bucket but i think the cake pan actually works better so i'm going to start with the harder pad i showed you and wrap the sandpaper sandpaper is actually one half of a sheet and i just wrap it around like that dip it in my water i'm going to come up here and start sanding now if you're sanding on the roof that's actually easier because it's very easy to do it one-handed and you can do it one-handed here too but if you find you're on a vertical surface such as a door panel the way i'm standing now using two hands is actually a little bit easier for you to do and get enough pressure to take the orange peel out and one of the keys to doing this is don't sand too long in one spot because if you do you may over sand and sand right through your clear coat because this is a base clear job now if you have a single stage you're not going to sand through the single stage as easy probably but you could depending on how much paint you stuck on the car i'm going to tell you on base clear you want an absolute minimum two coats of clear on the car don't even consider color sanding it so you'll need to have a minimum of that so when i paint a car with base clear i would have two coats of base to three coats of base and two to three coats of clear you can even put on more but you may be making more work than you need so as i said usually two is minimum three is probably ideal and you notice direction doesn't totally matter i just want to work against the surface and what i'm going to do now is what i do frequently here i have a bucket of soapy water and you want a microfiber washcloth don't use anything else but a microfiber washcloth bring it out and we're going to take it over and what we're going to do is we're going to clean off what we've already done and see where we are there's two reasons we're going to do this reason number one we don't want to sand through so you don't want to sand a long time when you're using the thousand grit in particular reason number two is we're going to evaluate where we are now i've got water on here right now we can't really tell what's going on so we're going to dry it off there's a good terry cloth towel or a microfiber towel would work fine so i'm taking it off whether or not it picks up in the camera i can see flaws see quas particular up here i didn't go far enough up in this area i've got flaws throughout here here this whole section is still flawed and it's flawed down over here so it tells us the number of places we actually already got it down far enough but other spots we don't so now we're gonna go back with a thousand grit and get rid of the basic orange peel with it so we're gonna take another turn with 1000 grit sandpaper back into our cake pan get our sandpaper wet and i wasn't far enough on the top so we've extended it on the top and we're going to come down we're going to work on the areas that we know aren't as good and work out the orange peel i cannot stress enough do not sand a long time without checking your work you do not want to over sand gets a little too dry go for a little more water another rule you want to keep in mind when doing this is if you have an edge for example even a rounded edge but the sharper the edge the less paint will be on the edge so the more you are to an edge of something do not sand as much there because you can sand through your paint easier that's just the physics of how paint is going to get applied no matter who's spraying it it's going to be thinner on edges now here i haven't gone far enough up so we're trying to go a little further up here i have a drip rail and i'm actually keeping my fingers so i don't get clear to the drip rail because i don't want to sand the paint off the drip rail if you're going to sand behind a drip rail that's one of the few times you would not use a sanding block and you would just do the area just behind the drip rail after you've done all the rest of it okay so we're going to take our wet rag and clean it off and do it again same process grab our towel and check our results now what we're seeing there's still a little bit in here there's still a bunch here this is the worst area that was the area with most nibs i've got a little bit down through here now i still have to go just a teensy bit more on the top this time i've switched the softer foam pad because we do have a lot of curve on the panel that will help me get some of this without making flat spots where i don't want it going through in one spot versus another so okay in this case i'm three times through i'm going to do a little more work down in here and then we'll go on to our next step so now we're going to go to 1500 grit some people go to 1200 grit in between i found you can just go 1 1500. so we're going to go to 1500 grit i'm going to wrap around my little foam block and we're going to start sanding again the idea here is actually to remove the thousand grit sanding scratches problem is even for me having done this quite a bit i can't tell totally visually that i've done the removal but again we're going to do the same sanding and washing process until we think it looks good enough and then we will go on from there when you switch grits it's a good idea to go further than you did with your preceding grit so if i stopped here i would go above it the reason we're doing that is we don't end up with a line at some point that we don't want we'll be back with you after we get the 1500 grit sanding done right we've completed a 1500 grit sanding at the moment now one of the things you can notice but you cannot see it in the camera i'm sure you can't if i look at this at an angle now it's already starting to shine for me to you and the camera it will look dull here we are with our next sandpaper 2000 grit this is our third sanding we're doing 2 000 grit this time same process as before we wrap it around our foam sponge or around our other block depending on where we're working on the car and we're going to sand it out again i'm not going to make you watch all that just the same process repeated but we are using 2000 grit next up we have 3000 grit sandpaper now this is supplied by 3m also it comes with its own foam pad it only lasts so long it's actually three layers the sandpaper the foam pad and a backing layer well that's the way it comes is three layers as i said eventually it starts to peel off the back as long as it's still working we're going to use it so i fold it in half i've dipped it into my water and soap mixture and you know you can actually go around in circles at this point even doesn't matter but how you're doing the 3000 it's more of a polishing job so i don't find that you need to go any specific direction now we're going to wash it off again and see where we are after having it rubbed down seriously with our 3000 grit sandpaper and our soapy water one thing you notice about the process it's messy now even from your vantage standpoint in the camera you ought to be able to see that that's starting to look a little bit shiny if i stand to the side it's actually quite shiny i don't know how many of you people know it but there's 5 000 grit sandpaper there it is from 3m 5000 grit sandpaper now in case those of you are watching don't know 5000 grit sandpaper obviously you can find it on the internet it's available through amazon there will be sellers selling the 3m product on amazon so the last step here is the 5000 grit just like we did with the 3000 and what i mean by last step it's the last sanding step and we're going to 5 000 grit the whole thing all right now that we've done 5000 we're going to wash it off one more time so that's the last of the sanding steps you get an idea of what it looks like i'm going to take the tape out of here it won't be necessary now that shows you what it looks like after we've done all that sanding now in real life we probably spent a good half hour at this so this is not a short amount of time you're going to put into doing this to a car next two things you're going to need 3m perfected rubbing compound now it comes in different sizes so i'm not going to give you the number it's called 3m perfected rubbing compound the different sizes will have different numbers in other words this is the compound you want to use at this point you're also going to need one or two other things you're going to need a little unit for polishing like this this is a little air powered one you definitely need this because there are spots on a car like this that you're going to have to have something small to work with but if you are working on for example a roof or a door panel [Music] you can use an electric polisher this i will tell you i wouldn't even look at the name this is called junk chinese garbage i mean it works but the handle breaks practically immediately because it's like most chinese things is very poorly made really so i wouldn't recommend the brand but i would recommend the polishing pads this is a finishing pad from 3m and they also have a compounding pad you have to have a compounding pad when you use the rubbing compound when you're going to use the other compound we're going to show you you would use the finishing pad so if you have a full-size buffer like this you could use it on this okay you could also use it on the roof you could use on the trunk panel but anytime you got to get close to something like in this area you're going to need the little polisher we're going to use the little polisher just because it's a small area it's easier for you to see what's going on we're using a little purple pad you can get a set at like o'reilly or other auto parts stores it includes this little purple pad also includes a black pad the purple pad is a compounding pad the black pad again is the finishing pad it's a 3m product if you want to get the little ones like this so we'll take some of our rubbing compound some people tell you i'll set it on the surface and then spin the wheel on it by hand for example i tend to like and this is almost empty so i'm going to shake it down i tend to like to just put some on the pad itself so you see i put a little stripe across it now we're going to start polishing now i'm going to warn you at any moment i don't know when the air compressor can go off so it may get loud and that's all you're going to hear since the compressor hasn't turned on let me tell you notice i'm moving around you do not stay in one spot you stay in one spot you will coming up with something called burn through because really what this clear coat is is that spray on plastic and you'll create so much heat you'll melt the plastic so you got to move around like i'm doing [Music] you notice that's only been a very short period of time and watch when i take a microfiber towel that is almost done in that area now i'm going to switch pads and show you the other compound to do the final finishing on it then i'll go about finishing the rest of this and let our videographer show you when it's done now this is what the 3m finishing pad for the small polisher looks like that is a great product works wonders but i'm also going to tell you you can go on amazon and this is one case where you could buy a set of chinese pads that you can throw away for the same price you're going to probably invest in the two 3m pads and they're actually going to work but they are going to throw away and not work as long but you get so many of them it doesn't matter because the back of these is set up for velcro which is how it attaches to my polisher the 3m has good velcro the chinese stuff has velcro that wears out fast but as i said because you get so many polishing pads you just pitch them so it's one of the cases where you could actually use the chinese product because it doesn't matter here's one of the chinese pads now it's neat that it's got those little bumps it actually does great especially when you're getting corners etc and conforms to stuff so that's really good and as i said i got a whole box these i think was 36 for 20 bucks or something like that is ridiculously cheap they were on amazon here's the other item you need though this is 3m perfected ex machine polish so it's 3m perfected ex machine polish and again i'm not giving you the number only because the number corresponds to the size so it's the name that you want 3m perfected ex machine polish so we're going to use a little chinese pad we're going to throw it onto our small polisher here you can really hear how good the velcro is on the 3m products and we're going to put on a bunch of our polish and i got quite a bit in here so we're going to put it on and you notice i like to put it on top of little bumps like that and now what we're going to do is polish now again at any moment the air compressor will go off [Music] all right you can see what's happened after we've done the final polish there and wipe that off with a microfiber towel i still have to finish out the rest of this which i'm gonna do and we'll let our videographer then show you but you remember and hopefully she will put the original shot in here and compare side by side so you can see where we've gone to when we're all done with this whole area i'll put in about an hour and doing it so the advantage of this goes this way if you have this whole car painted and have a decent paint job just a decent paint job you're gonna spend four thousand dollars if you have a show car paint job on it you're gonna spend twenty thousand bucks so the reason you might be interested in this is one maybe you wanna paint the car yourself just say i did it but two you might by wanting to save a hell of a lot of money real fast by learning to paint your own car doing it at home in your garage and or driveway and learning how you can fix problems like i've shown you here so i'm going to finish this out and you'll get to see this area all done [Music] so [Music] so [Applause] [Music] [Applause] bye

Channel: Carz Plus

Views: 217,426

Keywords: sand and polish clear coat, cut and buff, 3M sand and polish, spray paint a car, spray gun painting, polishing a car, buffing a car, buffing out scratches on a car, 1939 graham car, how to buff a car, car paint and restoration, 1939 sharknose graham

Id: 4WyHA9Kota4

Length: 22min 40sec (1360 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 15 2020