Originally posted by rbefly Thanks, Racer! Yes, it doesn't take much for my inner gearhead to get revved up either.
That VW has had a lot of work, but the body finish still says 'Rat', a look I'm gradually getting used to, if not appreciate. I much prefer an 'original' resto finish, or a modern paint job, but hey, to each his own.
Ron
You know, kind of missed this one. As shadetree-auto finish goes, I've been giving some thought to the Ratmobile's paint, which is generally good but has progressive sun-spoiled clearcoat damage on the hood and roof I'd been hoping to have arrested by now, (conditions in my driveway and lack of a few extra bucks have prevented this: I underestimated the impact of no-carport when it came to how much sun and dirt there'd be in the way of that. I'm planning to move where there'll be more shade and a carport, and I'd also prefer to make self and car look a touch more respectable with the resulting i-hope-relaxing-of-money-constraints.
Anyway, it's like this: Since I usually find hand-polishing paint to be something that makes about the right therapeutic exercise for the arthritis and chronic stuff, I've figured I'll just have the damaged clearcoat off and try my old procedure of using a combination of hand-doing things with polishing compound/Nu Finish, with some Meguiar's Mirror Glaze and then some layers of Turtle Wax, (Then see if that's equal to the intensity of the Southern Sun)
For the roof I've considered containing the clearcoat damage by spraying some of the middle of it with some silver paint(About the width of the sunroof) to reduce the hot-box factor of a dark wagon in this place, and preserving the rest which at the time wasn't so clearcoat-damaged. (Now that damage has crept to more-visible areas, so I might treat those like the hood, whether or not I paint the middle of the roof. That's still just a lot of surface area to maintain if I don't cover it with something more permanent than waxes and glazes, I think, )
If anyone's following that, I'm just wondering if anyone's aware of any useful options or products. (Most consumer stuff isn't marketed toward low-budget sweat equity, really. ) I've had the thought that I could take my time doing my polishing and coating, then when all the original paint on these surfaces is all nice, I might strip off all the waxes and apply some sort of good quality clearcoat out of cans or a rental compressor. Something I could lay down, let cure, and just wet sand to niceness might serve, for instance. It's the sort of thing you might just go to a Maaco etc for, I think, possibly much more efficiently, but there's a lot of more-important things car could use if it comes to paying someone else a chunk.
(Kind of a lot of the point is it may be superficial, but it's something I can do and accomplish when I can't do much else.
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