Quote:
Originally Posted by Forrest
At some point when do you worry that the clear coat is gone?
Thats the part i cant wrap my head around.
I have been thinking after the 2 year mark maybe get another clear coat on my car if at all possible.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by azn370z
From my online research polishing a z with a pc doesn't remove very much clearcoat. You can polish once a year for probably 10 years and still have clear Coat left. The results are much better than zainoing by hand.
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Correct. Thats part of what makes a PC a safe method for the DO IT YOURSELF/WEEKEND WARRIOR as well as the professionals. There are hacks out there that will take a rotary and wool pad to the most minor imperfections and cut right thru the clear. Its like using a bazooka to swat house flies, why go to that extreme? Never makes sense to remove lots of clear, when just removing a little will fix the problem.
Paint is measured in terms of mils, and average factory clear is going to range from 4 to 8 mils thick... if you use a good paint gauge your measurement will be in microns. 1000 microns = 1 mil... so a clear coat paint job should have somewhere between 4000 - 8000 microns of depth.
That being said a single pass of our swirl & haze remover with an orange pad will remove approximately 2-5 microns of clear, follow that with our Fine Machine Polish and you're looking at less than 1 more micron coming off, but we'll round up for the sake of argument.
So in a worst case scenario you'd be pulling off 6 microns of clear doing a 2 stage polish, one pass each, of our products. Leaving you with (even if you had thin clear coat) 3,994 microns of clear... at that rate you would have to do over 600 treatments of both SHR and FMP to get to an area of concern even on a THIN paint job.
Now of course this only takes into consideration a 'virgin' paintjob. If you're unfamiliar with the cars history or have extensive repair work done (ie - sanding or rotary buffing) you would have to consider these numbers differently. Your average "bad wash" swirl marks are going to be only a few microns deep so to level the clear and rid the surface of swirl marks will take only a few polishing passes in most cases. Also consider that if you use good wash habits, minimize the chances for new damage to occur, and thus limit the amount of swirls you should only need to polish a few times a year.
I'd say on my personal vehicles I average 2 complete corrections a year, usually less, with a couple of spot corrections for intermittent damage mixed in.
Long story short, polishing with a porter cable isn't ever going to be a concern for MOST people as long as the paints condition is 'factory' when you start. Most people won't own a car long enough to even worry about it in the first place. Think I read recently that the average ownership cycle for most americans is down to around 6 years now.