The past month or two I’ve been spending some time here and there cleaning up the paint on my c5. The car had a ton of light to moderate scratches, and a few really deep scratches. I’m over 140,000 miles now (DD it almost every day March - November), and there were a lot of areas on the car that really showed the age.
This is far from a perfection job, but I think there has been a pretty huge improvement and will probably be worth my time in the resale if/when I decide to sell. Also, keep in mind that the picture selection is pretty poor as I didn’t intend on making a thread or really documenting at all.
Here is the car before:
Here are the pad’s I used. Picked these up locally from Al Wil in 3 different stages:
Step 1. Find a large vessel for beer so you make less trips to the basement:
Driver’s door filled and leveled, 1st stage polish done (don’t have any of the finished product). You can barely see any evidence of those deep scratches.
Polish the area with the heaviest abrasive I have to clear as much of the scratch as possible.
Fill in many coats (10+) of touchup paint with a very fine point, (tooth pick, or a Extremely tiny brush made for it). Making sure that the level of the touchup paint is above the surface of the rest of the car.
Wetsand extremely lightly over the area to bring the high spots down to the same level. This is a process of sanding for 15-30 seconds, then wiping dry to see where you are. Be prepared to sand for up to an hour, checking your level very often.
You will know when you have the touchup spots back to level because everything will look uniform dull (from being sanded). Everything will be the same color with the same sanding marks.
Now you polish with the heaviest abrasive you have. Expect to go over the area 3-4 times working the polish completely out with a rotary before the sand marks are done.
Work your way up in stages (2 more stages is what I did) to bring to a perfect shine.
I can take some pictures of a step-by-step next time I do it. It’s not hard, just very time consuming. I am definitely no professional, but In my early college days ~10 years ago, I made a decent income doing small jobs like this. What I did here would easily fetch 200-300 for just the door scratches.
looks a million times better. I’m surprised you can make those scratches go away without having to repaint/blend the whole door. What did your pads run you?
I think these pads were 60 total for one light, one medium and one heavy (forgot the actual numbers on the values they were). BUT there were 2 in each pack, so 6 pads for somewhere around $60 was a great deal. They are far better than any of the other pads I’ve used from online. These were 3M purchased at Al Wil Supply on Transit.