Removing wet sanding haze!

[capitolason2]

My friend recently painted the hood of a car he is restoring and has some haze on it from wet sanding with 1200 paper. What machine and what product would it take to get rid of the haze from the sanding?

[Mike Phillips]

Just to double check, when you say haze, do you mean swirls or tracers?

Compounding swirls can make the paint look hazy, if he's use a compound where the abrasives don't break down, then the swirls may be very deep.

Tracers are the deeper scratches left behind after wet-sanding. Removing them mean machine sanding with a compound because of their depth. You risk heating the paint up also.

Finishing with #1200 grit is pretty crude when #1500 and #2000 grit papers are available. Stopping at #1200 means use a very aggressive compound to remove a ton of paint in order to remove the deep scratches.

Meguiar's doesn't teach this practice nor recommend it. I don't know what paper your friend is using, but it might be faster actually to re-sand using a quality paper like Meguiar's Nikken Unigrit Finishing paper in the #2000 grit and then go to a compound.

Not trying to be negative, but finishing with #1200 grit is something done by... hmm... how can I say this nicely....

How about this, most shops and professionals don't stop at #1200 grit because it's faster to re-sand with a higher grit than it is to try to remove this depth of scratches with a compound.

Also, how old is the paint?

If it's past a few days or a week and it's a catalyzed clear coat, it's probably so hard by now it's going to be a bear to buff scratches out of compared to the day after it was painted.

Let me know what you mean by the word haze and I'll do my best to recommend a product and process.