How to fix clear coat?

[Weston-work]

I know very little about detailing, but that didn't stop me from screwing things up. I had a several marks on my car that required wet sanding to get off, but I did it too much and messed up the clear coat. I put all kinds of wax on it, but I can still see the spots where I wet sanded. Is it a simple matter of using a clear coat polish, or do I need to spray some new clear coat on there and attempt to blend it in?

[DrJones]

is it like a large chunk that its missing or lots of smaller ones?

You might be able to spray some new clear on there and then polish it down, but i'm not sure how hard that is to match or how noticible it would be. I think it will be a little easier for you since white is easy to match, but i've never done it before.

You might do a search or ask the question on autopia.org. People there really know what they are talking about.

[STIBungy]

Paul, next time we meet up, I'll have to show you my peeling clearcoat. I just want to know if I can sand some of down and throw on a new layer. I dont really care about it blending in with the rest but the obvious flat spots are annoying.

[DrJones]

Paul, next time we meet up, I'll have to show you my peeling clearcoat. I just want to know if I can sand some of down and throw on a new layer. I dont really care about it blending in with the rest but the obvious flat spots are annoying.

I'd be curious to expirament with this if people are interested. You'd definitly need to clean and sand the area some, then respray it, then wetsand it back down and polish it. I'm sure I could find the details on how to do all the steps properly.

[Weston-work]

I sprayed some new clear on it, then wet sanding it a bit. It didn't look so great, so I decided to put polish on it. I did the Meguiar 3-step system and started with their paint cleaner stuff. That immediately removed much of the new clear coat that I had sprayed (even though it was prepped properly), so I ended up cleaning it all off. I now had my original clear coat with lots of blemishes again, but I put the polish on and it seemed to do a really good job of fixing that. I wiped the polish off after working it into the paint, checked it out under various light angles, and it still looked great. I was really pleased.

After that, the Meguiar's 3-step instructions say to use their wax that's part of that product line, but I already had tons of their "Cleaner Wax", so I just used that instead. I think that's where I screwed it all up... it seemed to undo the results of the polish, so I'm assuming that the "cleaner" part of that wax is responsible. I'm going to try it all over again with the right kind of wax and see what happens...

I'll probably use it to fix my Prelude's beyond-dead paint too...