You were too fast and posted the below before I could post my follow-up but I think we're on the same page now. Let me add a few comments...
You have answered my question. I am going to assume I have some sort of failure and proceed with caution.
Facing the front of the car, the hood has thousands of little scratches going in all different directions. They are evenly distributed over the center 1/3 of the hood. They don't look like pictures I have seen of cc failure.
The Honda Pilot we bought new in 2004, original paint, never been wrecked, has little tiny cracks in the clear coat on the hood and that's the only place. They are very short cracks, about like this,
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and are evenly distributed throughout most of the hood. They cannot be fixed without repainting because they are not a defect on the surface, they run throughout the entire layer of clear or the entire matrix of the clear layer of paint.
Sanding the paint would just remove paint and a deeper portion of the crack.
My guess is this is a heat related problem as it's only the hood that has been affected - engine heat under the hood, Mojave Desert heat on the top of the hood. It could also be related to expansion and contraction due to extreme temperature changes over time.
Just a guess... :dunno:
I am going to answer your other questions:
Yes, in '87
Never repainted
In the old days, a person was lucky if the paint lasted a few years, so 22 years is a pretty good run!
Used Megs SwirlX, gradually increasing pressure as I experimented over the period of a couple of weeks and didn't see a difference in the defects I was addressing.
One day saw straight scratches from my improper, too aggressive use of that great product and assumed the scratches were under the CC. Maybe just an illusion.
Clear coat paints are hard to work on, especially by hand as compared to old style single stage lacquers and enamels. It has to do with the type of paint as old style paints are more polishable, they are more malleable, while clear coat paints are kind of like a layer of hard plastic on the car.
There's a term from the old days that goes like this,
"Hand rubbed lacquer finish"
The reason craftsman/detailers from days gone by could hand rub lacquer paint was because compared to today's paints it's very soft, except for white paint due to the pigment type.
This is why you don't hear the phrase,
"Hand rubbed basecoat/clearcoat finish"
You can hand rub out a basecoat/clearcoat finish but it's a ton of work. Heck rubbing out a lacquer finish is a ton of work, doing the same on a bc/cc finish is a ton of work multiplied by a zillion.
This is the primary reason tools like the dual action polisher have become so popular. The human hand cannot outperform the machine.j
but it can be done as I demonstrated in these two threads,
Man versus Machine
1-Step versus 3-Step Process by Hand
And show to a small section of a hood at every Detailing 101 class.
Prior to starting to learn:
Various products including car washes and finally settling on Megs cleaner wax.
After:
All Megs:
-Gold Class wash with foam gun
-QD + mild clay
-M07
-Cleaner wax
-NXT
M07 is non-abrasive but a popular and very old product. Meguiar's A12 Cleaner/Wax is a very light cleaner/wax, I wouldn't try to actually remove swirls out of a clear coat paint with it as there are much better, faster and easier to get good results out of products, i.e. UC
I think this is the answer.
Thanks for finding my question:
How to deal with a defect that can't be removed.
Yeperdoo...
Something just can't be fixed.
The cleaner the car the worse it looks to me. All I see are the scratches when the sun is at the right angle.
The more you workout the fine or shallow defects the more the remaining deeper defects will stand out like a sore thumb. One of 2-steps forward, 1-step back kind of things but in my opinion I would opt for working out the shallow defects.
An philosophy I practiced when I used to detail cars full time was,
Take a car's finish to its maximum potential
This means do the best you can with what you have to work with. You can't fix every defect in every paint job but what you can do is take a car's finish to it's maximum potential.
Funny story, there was a group of guy that started a now dead forum and one of the members I'm guessing was making light of that saying and his signature line read,
Taking my signature line to it's maximum potential
Every time I read that it just made me laugh. :laughing:
Like Popeye says... (Paraphrased)
I yam what I yam...
Am doing it by hand to learn the "feel". Multi-step is fine.
You have set forth some options in your post. I will try ColorX if it turns out it's a surface defect.
ColorX compared to most cleaner/waxes is a fairly strong cleaner/wax, no one should read into this and think there are rocks in the bottle, it's not that kind of product.
Remember, besides product you have application material, application process, time and pressure. Lots of factors that go into how aggressive or non-aggressive a product can be.
BTW would using M21/NXT make the defect stand out more because I've read it makes the paint really reflective ?
I actually don't think so myself, not at this point where you've already been working on the paint and improving the overall appearance. At least no more so than any other quality paint sealant. Other's might have a different opinion.
I buffed out a car for a person one time that a couple of good ol boys painted for her in their garage. The hood had so much overspray on it you couldn't see the paint underneath of it. I removed the overspray and then buffed the paint clear, after restoring clarity to the clearcoat you could see wacky patterns in the metallic flake where the painter moved the spray gun closer and then father a way from the surface as he moved the gun back and forth.
At first the lady thought I caused the problem from the way I buffed out the car. When I explained to her the color and the metallic flake were UNDER the clear coat and that I was working on the top of the clear coat and there was no way I could affect the color of the way the flake laid down she eventually understood and thats when the old saying
You get what you pay for
Sunk in as it relates to letting a couple of good ol boys paint your car in their garage.
No one knew how wacky the paint job turned out till the overspray was removed and clarity restored to the clear coat, then it became very apparent. So sometimes fixing a paint job reveals a problem or defects in the paint job.
Was thinking of putting M26 over the NXT on the hood, but, then I read that it gives the paint more depth....might make it more noticeable. I want to have a really nice looking defect until I learn more about re-painting.
M26 is a good product, I always tell people to do a test spot when layering one product over another product, that is only apply the second product to a small section and then compare the test section to the surrounding paint with the first product on it and do this in different light settings. Make sure the topper is in fact taking the finish to a higher level and not diminishing the appearance. I've seen both thing happen with different products.
If you apply the topper wax to the entire car how would you know if it looked better or worse? By memory? Better to test.
Thanks Mike, I learn slowly, but, it's fun and you know how to teach. I will post again when I get some pics.
Sounds good...
Prior to that I used Megs Cleaner Wax to passionately grind surface contaminants into the finish. 