1963 FHC – Polishing the Paint

As the title implies, I did some polishing to the paint on the 63 FHC. Well, actually, I hired a guy to do the polishing. As discussed in several articles previously, the car has been painted Opalescent Golden Sand using a Glasurit Basecoat/Clearcoat system. Also as discussed, I had taken the paint through a complete cycle of wet sanding to remove orange peel and finish sanding in 1200/2000/3000 and polishing using a Rupes random orbital polisher. The paint looks really good in the direct sunlight but I have been a little let down by its appearance in indoor lighting. Now granted, most indoor lighting kind of sucks from a standpoint of making paint look its best but still, there are times when you want to show off your car and indoor lighting is all you’ve got.

I had recently joined some friends for beers and one of them arrived in a Porsche 911 whose paint job looked really amazing. I asked him about it and he said he had “a guy” who did the work to make his average paint look great. I got his contact info and a few weeks ago, Brandon showed up to see what he could do. He did some test panels and seemed satisfied that he could do some good. He said I had a lot of 3000 grit scratches that he would polish out. Now I must admit that looking at paint and saying there are some scratches, once the grit numbers get bigger than 200, always seems like a little bit of a lie for me, because I really can’t “see” scratches, unless I use magnification. I think at some point painters and detailers use this as a code for the amount of reflection and clarity that they can see or not see. Whatever, Brandon cleaned every panel and then went over the paint with a clay bar. I do understand at this level he is feeling the paint and making it be smooth and not grab on his microfiber towel. And you certainly don’t want to be polishing with anything on the surface that will just be picked up by the rotating pad and leave a set of bad scratches. Then he went after the paint with his own Rupes polisher, He went over the entire car with 3 levels of liquid compounds, working small areas at a time. We agreed ahead of time that he could/should stay away from the edges, which is where the most danger of cutting through lies. And when he was done, 12 billable hours later, the car looked amazing!

In retrospect, I think what Brandon brought to the table that I couldn’t was his thousands of hours of experience in knowing just how hard to push it without courting the disaster of a cut through of the clearcoat. Actually, he works mainly on new cars, which generally have much less clearcoat thickness than my car has. Regardless, I know that I have always been pretty tentative in my polishing efforts as I just did not want to have to go back to the paint booth, which I was thorougly sick of.

So “my guy” is Brandon Woo at Liquid Finish Detailing in Apex, NC. I couldn’t be happier.