This will be a slightly different article in a show and tell form. It's very difficult to illustrate the image of paint correction verbally, so pictures like these truly do speak volumes. This write-up will follow the steps and progression of paint correction on a single panel of a 2002 Audi A8L. This particular car is Brilliant Black. German cars are known for generally have hard paints. This particular era of Audi is notorious for the hardness and this particular color is know for being very scratch sensitive. We have a combination of a paint that is difficult to remove defects from, easy to scratch and in the case of brilliant black, shows any defects left behind. To further complicate matters, the paint was in very bad condition (but salvageable) and the owner wanted to achieve as much defect removal as was safely possible. Wetsanding may have been an option, but my personal preference is to avoid wetsanding on factory painted daily driver vehicles.
Several test spot were done on the vehicle to determine what process would achieve the desired results. It took approximately 2 hours to determine the various combinations used on different areas of the car. This is an essential step in removing the defects while preserving as much paint as possible. Don't do a single step to an entire car only to find out the results were not what you wanted. Spend the time up front to determine what process will work and repeat over the entire car, reevaluating as you go and making necessary adjustments.
Initial condition. You can see the severe swirls. These swirls are also hiding much deeper defects that stand out once the majority of the defects are removed. There is no way to discern the type of lights used by the reflection.
The first step in the process was with a rotary polisher, wool pad and Pinnacle Advanced compound. This is a very aggressive combination; it will quickly level defects and has the potential to burn through paint if not used properly. Below is a photo following the rotary step. You can see very fine and uniform swirls marks. These are not remaining from the initial condition, but were actually installed by the rotary and wool pad. It's important to understand that aggressive combination like this will leave their own defects that need to be refined with additional steps. The two light sources now have some definition, you can see a bezel exists around each light.
Because there were some defects from the initial condition that remained, a middle step was used to refine the rotary holograms and to remove remaining initial defects. This was done with a 21mm dual action polisher, microfiber cutting pad and a non-diminishing abrasive compound. This allowed for quick removal of the defects, a uniform finish and the ability to stop compounding as soon as defects were satisfactorily removed. Below is a photo following the refining step. What you will see is a slight haze in the paint. This is the result of an aggressive microfiber cutting pad and an digressive compound. Even dual action polishers can leave their own defects behind. With a slight tweak to the process, this haze may be imperceptible on a lighter colored paint and we could move on to protecting the paint. But on darker colors a final polishing step is necessary to finish the paint to near perfect clarity. Here, some additional definition in the lights is visible and you can see some additional detail in the bezels.
To remove the remaining DA haze, a 21mm dual action polisher was used with a polishing pad and finish polish. This combination only required a few passes to remove the haze and left the paint perfectly clear, Below is the final result. You'll see the deep, uninterrupted reflection in the paint, the detail in the bezel of the light is clearly visible. In the initial condition, the light source was not even distinguishable.
It takes substantial skill to determine a combination like this and react to changing conditions in the paint. It also takes solid commitment to see the work through the 15+ hours it took to correct this paint, but the final pictures of the fender below perfectly illustrates why we go to these lengths. Nothing compares to black paint when it's done right.
