How many times can you "Cut" a car?

[lacastel16]

hey, i was wondering,
1) how many times you can use Ultimate compound or Megs 105 on the clear coat before you start getting into the paint itself?

2)how many time can you use a polish like 205, before you can damage the paint?

i don't plan on doing it every weekend, but lets say once or even twice a year you do the swirl and scratch removal, how long before you start to damage the finish?

[ClearlyCoated]

Re: How many times can you "Cut" a car?

When you "cut the paint", you are really abrading the clear coat in micron thin layers. On most vehicles, the factory clear coat layer is typically 2 mm thick, so your planned schedule of once or twice a year is safe and what most members on MOL would adhere to for their vehicles.

But know the history of your paint and check for tell tale signs of impending clear coat failure, especially if you have an older vehicle that has not been maintained properly or left to the elements. Look for "crows feet" (tiny cross hatched lines that mimic the pattern of tiny birds hopping over your paint), and proceed with caution. The least aggressive combo remains the safest.

[Michael Stoops]

Re: How many times can you "Cut" a car?

hey, i was wondering,
1) how many times you can use Ultimate compound or Megs 105 on the clear coat before you start getting into the paint itself?

The honest answer is "once". If you actually remove swirls, fine scratches, etch marks, etc then you are removing some paint. Period. No matter who's products you use, whether you work by hand or with any power tool. The ONLY way to remove these below surface defects is to remove at least some paint.

2)how many time can you use a polish like 205, before you can damage the paint?

i don't plan on doing it every weekend, but lets say once or even twice a year you do the swirl and scratch removal, how long before you start to damage the finish?

Whenever someone asks this question, we like to ask them about their washing & drying process. If you need to buff out swirls twice a year at minimum then you need to evaluate how you're washing and drying the car as this is the source of the vast majority of these type of defects. Even a daily driver, if properly maintained, can go a couple of years without needing to fully correct it.

But let's put all this "paint removal" concept into perspective. No, there isn't a ton of paint on a modern, factory painted vehicle - only about 2 mils of clear coat (2/1000 of an inch). The fine swirls you see are incredibly shallow, but the edges of these fine scratches (which is what a swirl mark is, really) are very sharp and they act almost like a prism, bouncing very bright, white light back at you. When this happens over a dark base coat (black, red) the contrast is huge so the swirls stand out like a sore thumb. On metallic paints the metallic particles act like background noise, masking the swirls to some degree. Metallic silver is best at hiding swirls because the background color isn't that much different than the reflected light, and the metallic particles throw off enough "sparkle" of their own that it's hard to distinguish between metallic sparkle and swirl marks.

When you remove these fine defects a lot of what you're doing is rounding over these sharp edges, taking away the prism effect presented by the sharp edges. You're removing virtually nothing when doing this with something like M205 and a polishing pad on a DA buffer. It's only when you get into rotary compounding or wet sanding that you start to take off measurable amounts of paint, so those process generally can not be done repeatedly over the life of the vehicle. Rotary polishing with less aggressive liquids and pads is fine, if you know what you're doing. DA buffing is much more forgiving, much more fool proof, in the hands of a novice. But don't get lulled into a false sense of security by reading online that it's "impossible to damage your paint with a DA". You can. But you either have to try really, really hard or do something a bit bone headed.

The problems we see most often are when a novice user puts a 4" cutting pad on a DA and then uses a very strong compound to remove a deep scratch from a painted urethane bumper cover. Having read that it's "impossible to damage your paint with a DA" he leans on the darn thing, generates a ton of heat, and literally twists the paint off the bumper cover. But using 5.5" to 7" pads, even with quite a bit of pressure and Ultimate Compound, odds are incredibly slim that you'll do any sort of damage whatsoever, mainly because you aren't removing much paint at all.

[wifpd4]

Re: How many times can you "Cut" a car?

Quote:
Originally Posted by lacastel16
hey, i was wondering,
1) how many times you can use Ultimate compound or Megs 105 on the clear coat before you start getting into the paint itself?

The honest answer is "once". If you actually remove swirls, fine scratches, etch marks, etc then you are removing some paint. Period. No matter who's products you use, whether you work by hand or with any power tool. The ONLY way to remove these below surface defects is to remove at least some paint.
...

Michael, a bit of clarification please. A year and half or so ago, I would have asked the very same question "lacastel16" has asked. However, back then clear coat and paint would have meant two separate and different things to me.

So now I'll ask the same question, but perhaps phrased differently, "How many times can I perform a full correction using either Ultimate Compound or M105 (followed by SwirlX for micro-marring removal) on a clear coat before entering into the base coat of paint?

I ask this, because I read this weekend five times is the limit.

All of this seems product, pad, type of buffer (DA or Rotary) and paint specific.

So in general terms...is it truly "once"???

Continuing on that train of thought, once I penetrate the clear coat and enter into the base coat, how will I know and what will that spot look like? Is the base coat so incredibly thin, the primer will immediately show?

[Murr1525]

Re: How many times can you "Cut" a car?

Certainly nothing as specific as 5....

[Selectchoice]

Re: How many times can you "Cut" a car?

I ask this, because I read this weekend five times is the limit.

All of this seems product, pad, type of buffer (DA or Rotary) and paint specific.

So in general terms...is it truly "once"???

Continuing on that train of thought, once I penetrate the clear coat and enter into the base coat, how will I know and what will that spot look like? Is the base coat so incredibly thin, the primer will immediately show?

There will never be a clearly defined amount of times as such. One time is enough if you're unskilled and use the wrong technique with a rotary.

Re-sprayed paint, factory original.... so many variables.

Once the clear is removed the base coat looks flat, cause it is just that. The gloss is in the clear, and if you've removed that, well..it is fairly obvious. It isn't something you will easily miss.

As for the primer being visible, well it means removing the base colour coat as well as the clear.

Proper use of a DA, with the right products shouldn't see you having this happen too often at all, if at all.

[Murr1525]

Re: How many times can you "Cut" a car?

How much paint are you removing

[Don]

Re: How many times can you "Cut" a car?

Sometimes I think we get obsessed with having the "Perfect Finish," I know I did. While this may be possible on a trailer/show queen, it is unrealistic on a DD. It has been said several times here and on other forums that the best to realistically hope for is 80-95% correction. For the rest, 'concealment' is probably the better option especially for those who don't have years of experience behind them.

I just recently detailed my Suzuki and my wife's Explorer. I could have gone whole hog on them and worked from Ultimate Compound down to a glaze and finally a wax, but I have to be realistic. My car is only 5 1/2 years old (2006), but it has over 94,000 miles on it and I drive it about 100 miles a day so it gets plenty of road abuse. My wife's car (2003) has fewer miles, but it is a family car and gets cleaned up only when I get the chance. Family car = family abuse.

On my car, all I did was a rub with Ultmate Polish, DC2 and NXT2 to clean it up...even with the newly painted parts making the original parts look so bad. This was plenty to make the car look like a million bucks in other people's eyes and pretty darn good in my own, not "perfect" but pretty darn good.

On her Explorer, I did even less. A thorough rub with DC2 followed by Collinite 845 Insulator Wax. Now her car is a light brown/beige-ish metallic, so it doesn't show defects very clearly so the DC2 rub was plenty to make the truck look great in the layman's eyes and again "pretty darn good" in mine. I guess what I'm trying to say is that we don't always have to kill ourselves and risk the paint on our cars trying to get the flawless finish we are always striving for.

I would rather have a car that looks perfect from 5 feet away and have time to enjoy it rather than kill myself with a car that is perfect 5 inches away, but have no time to enjoy the car because all I ever do is (to use a term generically here) polish, polish, polish until it's finally "right."

[Michael Stoops]

Re: How many times can you "Cut" a car?

For purposes of this discussion we are going to assume that the paint in question is a base coat/clear paint finish, not single stage.

Michael, a bit of clarification please. A year and half or so ago, I would have asked the very same question "lacastel16" has asked. However, back then clear coat and paint would have meant two separate and different things to me.

"Clear coat" and "paint" really should not mean different things in the world of paint polishing; clear coat is paint (just lacking in pigment) and when you're working on your paint all you should be working on is the clear coat or you've got serious issues.

So now I'll ask the same question, but perhaps phrased differently, "How many times can I perform a full correction using either Ultimate Compound or M105 (followed by SwirlX for micro-marring removal) on a clear coat before entering into the base coat of paint?

I ask this, because I read this weekend five times is the limit.

All of this seems product, pad, type of buffer (DA or Rotary) and paint specific.

As you suspect, there is no definitive answer here. M105 on a DA with a yellow polishing pad at speed 5 with moderate pressure, or M105 on a rotary with a wool pad at 1800 rpm? Huge difference in potential paint removal. But if all you're looking to do is remove fairly typical swirl marks, towel marks, etc then the rotary route is probably overkill. Remember, those marks are not very deep at all, and removal of them (visible removal) often means just rounding over those sharp edges to prevent reflection from them. Virtually every time we've done a paint correction with a DA and measured the paint before and after, we haven't been able to actually measure any real difference; ie, virtually no paint was removed (or at least not enough for the paint thickness gauge to read). And since a good PTG will easily read to 0.01 mil, that's saying something. But let's assume that even with very aggressive DA polishing (and this really is nothing more than an assumption, due to the huge number of variables in play) that you do remove 0.01 mil with each correction. Heck, let's go crazy and double it - call it 0.02 mil. Almost every single auto manufacturer today will tell you that if you remove more than 0.5 mil you need to repaint the car. Note that this is NOT the same as going through the clear (which is, on average, about 2.0 mils thick). So a removal of 0.02 mil with each serious DA correction would mean you could do this 25 times before reaching the 0.5 manufacturers threshold - meaning you've still got 1.5 mils of clear left!

Now, this is NOT an invitation to just go crazy and buff away to heart's content any darn time you feel like it. If you do go crazy you can burn through the paint in a single session, even with a DA. We've seen it happen plenty of times, even though it's a very rare situation. Nothing is impossible. In the past couple of months alone I have personally seen two cases of burn through done by hand. In both cases it was just a tiny, isolated defect that the car owner attacked with gusto, apply heavy pressure for an extended period with pin point accuracy. The paint felt completely smooth, but it was flat and dull.

So in general terms...is it truly "once"???

In terms of "if I remove a below surface defect, will I remove some paint?" then the answer is definitely "yes". As has been pointed out, the only way to remove a below surface defect is to remove at least some of the surrounding paint, in this case the clear coat. My answer of "once" was intended to demonstrate that you are, in fact, removing at least some paint every time you buff it with an abrasive product. But that response was also to illicit a bit of a discussion (so, success on that point apparently!!) because we all too often have someone ask what product we have that will remove swirl marks but is non-abrasive. Sorry, can't have your cake and eat it, too.

Continuing on that train of thought, once I penetrate the clear coat and enter into the base coat, how will I know and what will that spot look like? Is the base coat so incredibly thin, the primer will immediately show?

The color coat is usually about as thick as the clear, but whether it's as easy to buff through once you reach it is something that I, personally, can't answer. And in reality, it doesn't matter, because once you're well and truly through the clear, you're goose is cooked anyway. May as well go down to bare metal because you're repainting that area no matter what at this point.

But how do you know you've gone through the clear? Dark colored vehicles will begin transfer colored pigment onto your applicator, light colored vehicles will be left with a dull spot as noted above. One of the cars recently brought in with a spot rubbed through by hand was a metallic white and the spot looked almost gray in appearance compared to the rest of panel. The clear coat was a pearl finish, and that pearl appearance was now gone from the spot.

There will never be a clearly defined amount of times as such. One time is enough if you're unskilled and use the wrong technique with a rotary.

Re-sprayed paint, factory original.... so many variables.

Once the clear is removed the base coat looks flat, cause it is just that. The gloss is in the clear, and if you've removed that, well..it is fairly obvious. It isn't something you will easily miss.

As for the primer being visible, well it means removing the base colour coat as well as the clear.

Proper use of a DA, with the right products shouldn't see you having this happen too often at all, if at all.

Good points all around.

Sometimes I think we get obsessed with having the "Perfect Finish," I know I did. While this may be possible on a trailer/show queen, it is unrealistic on a DD. It has been said several times here and on other forums that the best to realistically hope for is 80-95% correction. For the rest, 'concealment' is probably the better option especially for those who don't have years of experience behind them.

We tend to agree with this, especially when talking about a daily driver. That doesn't mean we don't think anyone should cut corners, or settle for less than what they want. But trying to chase perfection on a daily driver is an exercise in futility. We've had people come in to a TNOG session asking if we could help them with a little scratch on their car, and then watched as they spent 2 or 3 minutes trying to find the scratch - getting down to a low level, shining the light at various angles, searching, searching until a-ha!! there it is!!

Seriously?

For MOL members and members of other detailing forums, detailing your daily driver is supposed to be your therapy, not the reason you need therapy.

For a show car, or maybe your weekend toy, however, all bets are off. If you want to chase perfection, go for it. If you want to put in 40 hours making it as perfect as you can get it, knock yourself out. But in the context of this discussion, how often do you really need to do that to a show car or weekend toy?

[Selectchoice]

Re: How many times can you "Cut" a car?

For MOL members and members of other detailing forums, detailing your daily driver is supposed to be your therapy, not the reason you need therapy.

Quote of the millenium Mike! All too often forgotten.

[Blue Apollo IV]

Re: How many times can you "Cut" a car?

Sometimes I think we get obsessed with having the "Perfect Finish," I know I did. While this may be possible on a trailer/show queen, it is unrealistic on a DD.

+1 on this. I started down the obsession road with my current car. I had always had just kept my cars extremely clean and waxed...and I was happy with that. But all this current talk of "corrections" and "swirls" got into my head...and it took all the joy out of washing and waxing my car for me. I began constantly scanning my finish under lights looking for small scratches. I finally realized I was driving myself crazy with this seeking of maintaining perfection. I took all my "correction" liquids and such and put them away. I'm back to just relaxing and enjoying my car again.

Being obsessed may be fine for some museum piece....but not for me and my car. Whew.

[ffboy]

Re: How many times can you "Cut" a car?

Wow, this particular forum/tthread is a good read.. I do like having shiny cars, and i like keeping it that wax. I do have swirlx and UC, but sometimes i use one of them too often since i want a very nice smooth finish on my daily driver, but it was becoming a bit of an obsession.

I'll still strive for a nice looking car, but perfection in every car and every situaltion? maybe not. Maybe I'llm conceal some imperfections with a glaze or pure polish. They work well anyway, then a coat or 2 of wax. They worked well in the past, so why not make my life simple in keeping my cars shiny?

[Mike Bones]

Re: How many times can you "Cut" a car?

Just to add my 2 cents in here... I agree with what's been said wholeheartedly as well. I feel sometimes we forget that the little dings and scratches we get on our cars add character; badges of honor, so to speak. When my car got it's first scratch, I hit the Internet searching for solutions to it. But in the end, no matter
how much Dr.Colorchip or paint pens we use, the blemishes will still be there. These blemishes are signs that a car is driven. May it be for recreation or grocery getting, it's what makes it YOURS.

Now I'm not saying you shouldn't try to make your car look it's best, just you shouldn't try SO hard to make it look it's best.

[Fly Bye]

Re: How many times can you "Cut" a car?

The honest answer is "once". If you actually remove swirls, fine scratches, etch marks, etc then you are removing some paint.

I think the OP is referring to "cutting through the clear, and into the base coat". That's what he meant by "getting into the paint itself".

[lacastel16]

Re: How many times can you "Cut" a car?

beautifully said "Don." I was so obsessed with getting my car perfect that i forgot to enjoy washing it. it's not realistic for me to get my car's paint perfect, unless it's a show car, which it isn't. i am always going to get dings, scratches, etc just from driving everyday and i realized it and just stopped obsessing over it now. thanks for all the comments and advice. thanks mike for actually taking the time to answer my and other's questions.