Orange Peel paint on German cars...

So, Orange peel paint, My S3 has a fair bit of Orange peel on the side panels, my old GTD had even more, my mate brought his brand new M135i over yesterday to show it off, and the paint was all orange peel. I parked next to a black c63 AMG (13 Plate) this morning, and guess what, not much but still some orange peel on the side panel.

From what I gather the corrective process is to wet sand the paint, Sand and paint in the same sentence are more than enough to make me nervous, but really who has done this to correct orange peel, and really how dangerous is it?

DJ_26 said:

Orange peel is certainly a pain! I think skilled wet sanders know what they are doing and can take off only a few microns of clear coat when they sand the paint, so there is plenty left. So as long as the paint depth gauge shows you got plenty of paint to play with, then I wouldn't worry! I'm guessing you already have looked into this, but KDSDetailing are well known for this kind of work. I think they even offer courses on doing this too.

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So I went to scrap merchant yesterday and picked up an offside front panel from a red e46 BMW 3 series, it ended up costing me £15 plus the hour or so it took to remove it from the car and drive home, i am pleased to say the paint on the panel has a significant orange peel effect on it, not to mention plenty of surface scratches and swirls.

This weekend i am going to wet sand the panel, and see if i can correct the orange peel. After I have done this a couple of times I am going to attempt to correct the orange peel on my wife's Golf. I am not however going to correct my S3 for obvious reasons...

I'll take some pictures of before and after (even if i wreck the panel)

Bristle Hound said:

@Firstname_lastname - A braver man than me wetsanding

Quite a bit on DW about it that may help you mate -
http://www.detailingworld.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=141365
http://www.detailingworld.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=247139

& this one in particular -
http://www.detailingworld.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=217353
One of the best threads on DW IMHO

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I am probably wrong in this case, but i assumed learning to wet sand would be the same (ish) as learning to use the DA polisher, and not do something uncorrectable to your paint, before i let my self loose with the polisher i bought 4 panels from the scrap merchant (my wife was so pleased when I rocked up with them and told her i was keeping them in the garage) and learned (with the help of youtube/detailing world and a friend) how to two stage polish etc.

And in fairness to myself I am not going to go anywhere near the paint on the Golf unless I am 100% certain i can do it properly, which might never happen. But I wont know unless I try

I love detailing cars, I am totally addicted to it now, although I'll only ever claim to be an amateur at it.

Updates ahoy,

So yeah orange peel...

In preparation for this i got myself a paint depth gauge (which I have to say is worth every penny i paid for it) a sanding block, some 2000, 2500 and 4000 grit paper, and i used diluted washing up liquid as a lubricant (i played around with the dilution ratios a bit then settled on 40:1)

I soaked the paper for about 15 min's in the solution before using it.

So apparently the orange peel is in the clear coat on my donor panel, which is awesome because i didn't fancy taking the clear coat off completely to get to the colour coat, that an the fact I had no idea how to put the clear coat back if i did go through it.

I started out with the 4000 grit (using the principle of use the least aggressive first) which after what seemed like an age i had made almost no progress on the orange peel, what i did notice though was that the paint had a nice smooth(ish) finish on it (minus the orange peel of course), so i broke out the 2000 grit and went to work, much better results this time, i got rid of as much of the orange peel as i was comfortable with (there was still some left though it was only just visible) and swapped back to the 4000 grit (after being advised by a friend that the opposite logic applies to sanding, you start out with a lower grit and finish with a high grit) then I broke out the DA and polished the sanding marks out, which wasn't as difficult as I imagined.

Well i am not entirely happy with the results, but i am not unhappy either, i didn't get rid of the orange peel completely but I think the panel ended up being quite shiny after polishing, although i probably could of gotten similar results by just using Scholl s20 black on it anyway...

wet sanding by hand is a very slow methodical process, and really i was knackered/bored after doing half a panel, i dont think I'd relish doing an entire car...

anyway the next thing is trying to fix stone chips by painting wet sanding and then polishing.

scotty76 said:

http://www.detailingworld.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=244507

Epic.

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Holy **** I am stunned.

I am currently going through the process of reading old threads on DW that are useful, and this one definitively is that. Thanks for pointing that out, if there are any other good threads you know of, not necessarily about wet sanding, pass me the links.

I'd literally spend all day every day absorbing info from DW if i could get away with it (which i can't).