This car was restored in the late 80's with single stage paint so the paint was fairly soft but it had some really nasty scratches in the surface. That meant we had to get a bit aggressive in order to remove the deeper scratches, but doing so also created some hazing in the paint. We also discovered this paint to be extremely sensitive to tool speed, pressure and amount of product used.

We started out with M205 Ultra Finishing Polish on a foam polishing pad, but it was slow to remove the worst of the defects. So we stepped up to microfiber finishing pads and that made a huge difference. We were using the new Rupes LHR21 Bigfoot buffers (essentially a DA buffer with a 21mm stroke, which is huge compared to the standard 8mm throw of all other DA buffers on the market) with a small amount of product - 3 pea sized drops on a fully primed pad, speed 4 on the tool and moderate pressure. That was working quite well, but with a fair bit of hazing, until I accidentally stumbled onto something: I needed to up the aggressiveness in order to remove a certain extra nasty scratch, so I bumped the tool up to speed 5 and increased the pressure, and not only was the scratch gone but the haze was almost gone, too! It sounds totally backwards, but on this paint it was magic!!

So we altered our technique to reflect this, and really held back on the amount of product used. Most people tend to use way too much product anyway, but we found on this paint that a very small amount gave the best result. We were running 6" pads for the bulk of the work, but moved to 3" pads on the Meguiar's G110v2 buffer for all the tighter areas on the car (around all the trim on the hood sides, between the front fenders and hood, etc). The slight amount of haze we did have after major correction was removed with the same M205 but on foam finishing pads for a very soft touch to the paint for that finish polish step. We even went over the chrome with M205, and used our consumer Gold Class Leather Cleaner & Conditioner on the interior. We topped off the paint with Gold Class Carnauba Plus paste wax.

What you can't see in the pictures is the true condition of the paint on the trunk - it really needs to be wet sanded and compounded to remove the excess texture, but we were not given enough time to do this - we had from about 7:30AM to 6:30PM to work on the car and we would have loved to have another couple of days to do some sanding and even experiment with some other bugging techniques. I would have loved to run some M205 on a foam finishing pad with a rotary buffer at very slow speed (600 rpm max) to really make the paint pop even more.

Paint polishing is a great example of the "law of diminishing returns" concept. It can take 30 man hours like we did on this car to get the paint to this point, which I would say was maybe 85-90%, and it can take as many man hours again to go from that to 95%. We simply weren't given the time we really wanted to do full justice to this car, so we did what we could to maximize our efficiency and the ultimate outcome. Given the time constraints, we were very happy with the end result.