Honda Pilot Clearcoat

Jenn1270

Jenn1270

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I have a 2006 Honda Pilot, While leased, I took care of it, but didn't obscess. How that I bought it I am getting quite anal because I want it to last forever. I've had it washed at the local car wash/detail shop and had them hand wax it every 3 months or so.

I've noticed that there are TONS of chips in the hood down to the primer. I guess this is a side effect of living with all the rock trucks in Dallas.

I am worried there is an area of clearcoat breakdown on the front quarter panel. I thought it was initially old wax that didn't get removed but I clayed it, swirl-xed it, and ultimate compounded it (all by hand) but it is still there. I will try to take a pic of it when the sun is out good.

1.) Are honda pilots known to do this? I am a bit dissapointed that this showed up after the 3 year warranty.

2.)Are there any other ways to see if it is a clear coat failure or anything else I can use to try and clean it off. Fortunately it isn't real noticible to anyone but me.

3.) Are their any way to protect from all the paint chips short of getting the 3M plastic coating applied.


Thanks,

Jenn
 
I love Hondas, but unfortunately they are known to skimp on paint and the damage to your hood/front 1/4 panels is not uncommon. The best course of action(If you do not want to repaint the hood) is to polish within reason and use a good LSP. It sounds like repainting would be foolhardy right now because of driving around the various rock trucks in your area. Another short term solution is a clear bra, or a polypropolene wrap on the front portion of the hood after you polish it.
 
Funny, I was just posting about this on CorvetteForum...


Here's something I wrote a while back on this topic...

Rock Chip Repair


Because rock chips are a divot or low spot in the paint, (paint's missing), compounding or polishing won't fix the problem it will just remove the good paint surrounding the chip.

The only real fix is to somehow add replacement paint to the chipped area and this is usually harder to do and make it look great than most people think.

Most people want to fill in the rock chips and make it look like,

  • There were never any rock chips.
  • There's no visual imperfection after the chip has been filled.
Most of the time what happens is a person will use the built in paint brush in the lid of a bottle of touch-up paint to fill in the chip and because the brush head is large and the chipped area is tiny you go from a chipped area that's missing paint to a blob sitting on top of the paint.

So while the chip is filled in you now have an unsightly blob. The next thing the person will want to do is to sand the blob flat and then somehow remove their sanding marks. This can get complicated because compared to touch-up paint, most modern clear coats tend to be much harder. The result is after sanding it will be easy to remove the sanding marks out of the touch-up paint but difficult to completely remove all the sanding marks, (scratches), out of the clear coat paint.

Also, if you buff to hard on the repaired area often times you actually pull the touch-up paint right out of the rock chip so now you're back to where you started only not only do you have the rock chip but you now also have sanding marks in the clear paint surrounding the rock chip.

Fact is you can make rock-chip repair as complicated as you like and sometimes the more time and work you put into it doesn't net any better results then simply dabbing in a very tiny amount of touch-up paint and then walking away.

I've seen the Dr.Color Chip system demonstrated in person and was quite frankly amazed at how well it worked and it actually looked pretty easy to use.

Dr. ColorChip: Automotive Paint Chip Repair Systems


Another option would be to find a Pro Detailer that offered the Dr.ColorChip repair system as a service and simply let them do it for you.


:)
 
I am in a similar situation with my wife's dark green 2001 Honda Odyssey. We didn't wax it much and I can now see the start of clear coat falure on the first 1/4 of the hood with a few rock chiops as well. I am just getting into detailing and used the Odyssey as my testing ground for my new PC XP and some Meguiar's Speed Glaze. I wasn't sure how abrasive I wanted to start, but maybe the polich made the small cracks & lines show up all over the front part of the hood. It's absolutely smooth after the polish though. I see some other issues I wanted to use Meg's Ultimate Compound on, but was wondering if that can make matters worse with the clrearcoat. Can you stop the progression of clear coat failure? I just placed another order from AG for some Duragloss 105 and Collinite 845 hoping that will help.
 
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I've actually already ordered a Dr. Color Chip kit. I'm glad it looked like it worked. Will I need to sand the edges of the chips? When I was ultimate quick waxing today the microfiber was catching on some of the chips.
 
Jenn1270 said:
I've actually already ordered a Dr. Color Chip kit. I'm glad it looked like it worked. Will I need to sand the edges of the chips? When I was ultimate quick waxing today the microfiber was catching on some of the chips.
Click to expand...

Reread my first post to this thread, it talks about your different options, such as making the process as complicated as you want and that sometimes, (often times actually), the more and more work you put into rock chip repair doesn't always equate to better and better results.



Most people want to fill in the rock chips and make it look like,

  • There were never any rock chips.
  • There's no visual imperfection after the chip has been filled.
While this is a worthy goal and the ultimate goal it's a lot harder to do than most people think.

If it were easy, all detailers were offer it as a service, yet most don't, in fact a majority of detailers don't offer rock chip repair and there's two reasons for this,

A. It's hard to do and do in a way that a customer will be pleased
B. Most people don't want to pay a fair price for the time-intensive and hard work that it is to do rock chip repair.


If you want to sand your rock chips before you use the Dr. ColorChip repair system be sure to read their instruction first to see what they recommend and then proceed, don't start sanding till you've read the instructions.

Keep in mind that modern clear coats tend to be hard and while it's easy to sand paint, (that's putting scratches into the paint), getting them out is difficult for the majority of people on earth.

Just wrote this one, it talks about paint hardness...

The practical differences between single stage paints and a clear coat paints


:D
 
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