Car detailing/Paint experts - Need help removing PAINTED pinstriping!

Originally Posted by Junkman2008

Okay, here's the deal.

You're dealing with PAINT on top of CLEARCOAT.

You don't use paint thinners to remove paint from your clearcoat, unless the paint has just been spilled onto the clearcoat and it is still WET. Obviously, years of baked on pinstriping is NOT going to come off with paint thinner.

You don't use clay to remove paint.

Consumer clay is used for removing CONTAMINATION ON THE PAINT. You don't use clay to remove PAINT. That was a complete waste of time and money. Clay can be used to remove VERY LIGHT OVERSPRAY, but that stuff has not adhered to the paint so it can easily be removed a couple of different ways.

The only way to remove pinstriping is WET SANDING, NOT DRY SANDING, and I DO NOT recommend ANYONE with no wet sanding experience to try and do so. If you pay a professional to do it and your clearcoat fails in the future, you have a recourse. If YOU do it and your clearcoat fails, you have a paint shop to pay. With that said, 1000-grit sandpaper is GOD AWFUL AGGRESSIVE, and will require a decent polisher (like the Flex-3401VRG or similar), along with an aggressive COMPOUND (like the 3M Rubbibg Compound), in order to remove that sanding damage. The PC-7424XP is NOT going to fully remove 1000-grit sandpaper damage. Using 1000-grit sandpaper is going to eat up some clear coat VERY fast and strikethrough can easily happen, especially if you don't know what you are doing. Add to that, they don't put enough clear-coat on the Z to be experimenting on one without knowing what you are doing. I've worked on a few so I have firsthand experience with the lack of clear that they use.

1500-2000 grit is all that I would have tried on a factory painted Z, going slow as I go and paying close attention to how much clearcoat that I am removing. Since I would be WET SANDING, I can easily see how much clearcoat I am removing. Since the stripping is ON TOP of the clearcoat, you are going to want to remove THE LEAST amount to NONE of the clear coat that is on the car, as clearcoat is the LAST thing you want to cut off the car in this situation. You want as much of that stuff to remain on the car as possible for obvious reasons.

This is why you pay a professional to do professional type work. In the long run, paying someone to fix something like this is a hell of a lot cheaper than painting the entire car, which is what you will have to do if the clearcoat fails in the future.

We all like being able to work on our cars but some things, like rebuilding the transmission is something I won't screw with no matter how good someone's instructions are. Hell, I have the dealership service manual to my car, which clearly explains how to fix EVERYTHING on my car and there are still plenty of things that I won't try. Advance paint maintenance takes instruction and experience. You start on a hooptie, not your Z.

So if you want my advice, let a professional remove those stripes, if you can find someone bold enough to do so. Good luck with that though because when you tell them that you've already started the process, they may shy away. If they do, thank them because that's a sign of someone who doesn't want the future of your clearcoat on their hands or they are too lazy to do the job without painting the entire car, which is probably what a dealership would tell you.

Whatever you do, don't take it to a dealership.