Hello everyone, my name is Gaston Orsenigo, I am 34 years old, I am a Professional Detailer since 2009,
I live in Buenos Aires - Argentina.
Hi Gaston,
I actually met a guy named Gaston when I taught a class in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Are you the same Gaston?
Autogeek's Detailing Class in South America!
Besides all the other cool topics covered, I had the good fortune to have a classic Ford Mustang with a new crappy paint job to teach this class how to
WETSAND by hand and machine.
A few pictures from that class.... hard to believe this was almost 7 years ago...
How to tape-off a car for wetsanding
After decontaminating the paint it's time to tape-off all the edges and raised body lines. For this we go over tips and techniques for laying down 3M Blue Vinyl Tape.
Measuring Paint Thickness
Even though custom paint jobs will normally have more clear paint on them than a factory finish it's important to measure the paint thickness to help you make what I call
The Go or No Go Decision
The paint on this car was averaging around 10, 11 and 12 mils so we decided to
go forward with the sanding process.
How to correctly hand sand
First we went over the correct techniques for hand sanding. While it's important to know how to use the right technique when sanding by hand I also know that once a person hand sands and then machine sands, except of tight or intricate areas they will always opt to machine sand instead of hand sand because not only is it faster but it also does a better job and leaves more paint on the car. The buffing step also goes a lot faster as it's a LOT easier to remove machine sanding marks than it is to remove hand sanding marks.
Notice the
tight, close pattern to my strokes when hand sanding. Your sanding mark pattern should not look like you're making
W's or
M's in the slurry.
Machine Sanding - Edging
I love the Griot's Garage 3" Mini Polisher. I cal it a
3" Wet Sander because it works so well for machine sanding with 3" sanding discs.
What I do when I sand down a car or teach others to sand down a car is to start by doing what I call edging.
Edging is where you sand the paint next to any edges or raised body lines first and then after sanding these perimeter areas tackle the major sections of the paint. In my classes I go over why this is important for a number of reasons and to do this by machine you must have a 3" orbital polisher that you can use with the 3" discs or do it by hand.
Machine Sanding - Majoring on the Majors
After showing how to edge a panel and explain why to do this first, next we switched over to the Porter Cable 7424XP with 6" Trizact #3000 discs and knocked out the major portions of the panel right up to where we edged the panel.
Faster, easier and you leave more paint on the car
Not only is machine sanding faster for the sanding step and faster for the buffing step it's also a LOT easier because the machine does all the work for you.
The class did a GREAT job and saved the crappy re-paint on this classic Mustang.
