Wet sanding with 3000 grit?

[fightnews]

IMO it's not worth it. There are lots of BMW discussions around this as they tend to suffer from Orange Peel on various vehicles. For me, no way. Clear isn't as thick as I'd like it to begin with. For the occasional tough scratch I'd just fill it in with clear and level it down as best I can.

Body shop wise, they aren't detailers so I would expect you to have to compound and polish out the newly done panel. I had a small area of work done on my Audi and it came out better than the factory paint. I used Meg's U.Compound and finished and sealed it with 505 as it's safe on new paint.

I got the car back the paint looks phenomenal I'm not going to sand the new bumper. I might try to sand the factory orange peel on the doors. Obviously if I do ill start with 1 door and get it complete.

Ok. I have never seen any 3000 grit that is not foam backed. Here locally the only 3K paper avaialble is 3M Trizact and when I ordered some from Autogeek last year I was Meguiar's Unigrit and both the 3" and 6" disks are foam backed. Mike told me that Unigrit has been discontinued (probably because 3M purchsed Meguiar's and did not see the need to have 2 competing sand paper lines... maybe they could learn something from Coke and Pepsi here LOL).

But yes, if you could find 3000 grit paper without the foam backing and you use it on a bloc, what would work for leveling.

I got the unigrit from meguiras from another online store it must be old stock. i bought the block too.

Thanks todd from rupes for the advice.

So even if I got a reading the guage can't tell how much is base paint and how much is clear right?

IDK If I mess up a panel at least I know where to go to get it repainted. If I do sand through the clear on 1 of the doors I am debating of bringing it back to have them paint the hood so I can just have them do both

 

[Calendyr]

No paint gauge can tell you how much sealer, primer, color coat and clear coat the car has. As a rule of thumb, your clear coat should represent about half of the entire paint thickness. This can vary, it's not a hard rule.

This is why you don't want to sand very thin paint, you could be removing almost all of the clear coat in the process.

So what range of paint readings are you getting?

Also, an other trick, take a paint thickness reading in the door jabs. There is usually a lot less clear there, so you can get a feel for the thickness of the clearcoat on the car by doing a comparisson between the door jab reading and the pannel readings.