Blooming BMW
Entry posted by Rocky
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The red paint on my car has been blooming for a few years now, to the point it is now called "the pink panther" by people who like to tease me about it.
The problem with the paint is two fold - the laquer and the paint itself. The laquer on this car is extremely tough, most cars this age don't have the factory laquer intact, it has long worn off due to environmental effects and either years of polishing or years of neglect.
The good news about cars where the laquer has worn off is that the underliyng paint can then be brought back to life with appropriate paint products like cutting polish etc.
The bad news for me, was the laquer was so thick you could not use paint products, but it was now so brittle it had started peeling from points that it had been damaged by stone chips etc. This meant the whole bonnet looked like a bad case of sunburn, peeling and bubbling all over.
So a couple of days ago I bit the bullet and took a power wash nozzle over the whole bonnet, effectively stripping all the lacquer off, it peeled of real easy under that sort of pressure. Then I applied a cutting polish which brought the paint back up to it's original colour to a remarkable extent. Not perfect as cutting does not give a 100% consistant effect over a large flat panel, but good enough and 100% better than they way it had looked. Tomorrow I'll apply a 3 part wax to protect it, and then a clear coat compound on top that will help keep it clean.
Hopefully all that will protect it from the suns rays, because if it does not, then the paint will start going pink again very quickly as it oxidises again, and all my effort will have been pretty much a waste of time. If it means going through an extensive polishing process every six months, I can live with that, but if it starts blloming again in 6 weeks, I'll be sick as a a parrot.
Anyway, here's how it looks - a comparison splice photo, tomight on the right, yesterday on the left. The blemishes on the left you can just see are not water spots or dirt, they are paint blemishes where the laquer peeled off months ago, but after a bit of polishing, it comes up as per the image on the right!
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