Clear coat has a ton of uses, but one of its most prominent applications is when polishing your car. Getting your car’s finish to look good as new can be tricky without a clear coat. Sure, it’s possible, but you have to do it right to preserve the paint.
Here’s how to polish a car without clear coat:
- Park the car in a conducive place.
- Clear the area.
- Wash the exterior of your car.
- Gauge the paint thickness.
- Tape the corners up.
- Choose your pad and polish.
- Carefully polish the car body with the compound.
The rest of this post will discuss the above steps in greater detail to help you understand what exactly you need to do in each. I’ll also cover other crucial information about polishing a car without clear coat later on, so be sure to stick around for the long haul. Let’s get going.
1. Park the Car in a Conducive Place
The first step to polishing your car is to get it in a conducive space for the detailing. You should park it in a cool, shaded area with a solid floor for a couple of hours before cleaning.
If the car frame is heated up by the sun, it becomes more likely that soap will dry off on it and get stuck to the paint. Because there’s no clear coat on your car paint, it may not be very glossy. Getting a soap stain out is difficult enough, but getting it out of a non-glossy surface is harder.
You’ll also need to clean your car by washing it, so a sandy or grassy floor may not work well. The sand or mud can easily splash up and stain the body of your car when you’re washing it, making things messier. A stone or cement floor would be perfect, especially if it has a finish rough enough to give you adequate traction to move the car when it’s wet.
2. Clear the Area
Washing, polishing, and cleaning your car can quickly get messy. So when you choose a spot to polish your car, you’ll want to rid it of any items that might get dirty or damaged by water and polishing debris.
If you can’t move everything, try to clear the area of hard-to-clean items. The debris from car polishing can wipe off easily but may be difficult to get out of tiny crevices. If you are using a machine like a spray or a wheel to polish your car, take extra care to keep your children and pets away from the area.
3. Wash the Exterior of Your Car
Next, you should wash your car with automotive soap and water. All you need to wash for your polishing project is the exterior of the car frame. If you intend to wash the other parts of your car regardless, get it done with pre-polish washing. It’s not a good idea to get soap on it so soon after polishing because the paint could be pretty delicate, especially since it doesn’t have clear coat.
This isn’t always necessary, but you could spray some water on the car before washing it. It helps to soak up the dirt and debris that may have stuck to the paint, so it’s easier to clean. If you’ve been driving in grassy or muddy terrain, you should be especially keen to spray the bottom and underside, where there would be the most mud.
It’s best to get automotive soap specifically made for washing cars, but any mild laundry soap could be a great substitute too. Put the soap and water in a bucket and hand-wash the car from top to bottom with a soft sponge. If you find any clump of dirt or debris, take it out, so it doesn’t affect your polishing later.
Thoroughly rinse all of the soap with water and leave it to air-dry. If you don’t have the time to let it air-dry, you can use a light, lint-free microfiber cloth to wipe off the moisture.
4. Gauge the Paint Thickness
Accidentally burning through the paint all the way to the primer is a huge polishing nightmare. It’s a common error because coating layers vary widely in thickness, especially with cars lacking clear coat.
To avoid this, determine how much paint you can afford to take off the car frame. You can figure this out by getting the depth of the paint using a paint thickness gauge.
When you place the gauge on the car’s body, the sensor in it measures the overall thickness of all the layers up to the metal panel. The measurement is given in microns (1/1000 millimeters), and most cars with at least 110microns of paint can be safely polished. The polishing takes off 3 to 6 microns of paint depending on:
- The paint type
- The blemishes on the surface
- The polish pad used
- The compound.
If you don’t have a paint thickness gauge, the best option is to be extra careful while polishing the car. Many cars without clear coats are vintage products with single-stage paint. That means that there’s a high chance that the initial paint has been polished multiple times over the years, and the paint layer may have lost its thickness.
5. Tape the Corners Up
The paint thickness isn’t always equal on all parts of the car. Certain areas have particularly thin paint, so they need to be covered with masking tape. These are mainly the edges and high points on the body of your car.
Because the rubber trim and metal badges on your car are also not covered by paint, they can get burned, scuffed, or discolored by the chemical from the polish. These mistakes are pretty likely no matter how careful you are, so the easiest solution is to protect these parts of your car by covering them up. Areas to tape off include:
- Seams
- Edges of panels
- Body lines
- Badges/Emblems
- Taillights
- High points
- Rubber seals at the doors and windows
- Door handles
6. Choose Your Pad and Polish
Before polishing, you have to figure out what polishing pad and polish compound will suit your car. Paints without clear coat overlaid are much “softer” than those with the coat. If you’re dealing with a single-stage paint, their types vary widely, so there’s no one-size-fits-all pad or polish.
If your car is dark-colored, the paint will be more sensitive to swirl marks from rubbing the pad on it, so you should choose the softest possible option. Light-colored paint is more likely to withstand a harder pad, but it doesn’t hurt to tow the safe line by selecting a soft one for those too.
You’ll have to test different combinations to figure out the right pad and polish for your car. Pick an inconspicuous test area on the body of your car and try out the pad and polish combinations, starting with the softest pad and mildest polish.
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Check the combination’s effect on your paint, and decide if you’re satisfied. If it works fine, stick with it. Otherwise, change the polish while keeping the pad softness the same, then see the effect. If the polish seems fine but needs more power, change the pad to a slightly more abrasive one and check again. Repeat this process until you get satisfactory results from one of the polish-pad combinations.
You should get multiple pads because you can’t mix polish compounds (which means you’ll have to use a fresh pad when trying every new polish). You might also need to change your pad while polishing the car, even if you’re using the same combination.
7. Carefully Polish the Car Body With the Compound
Dampen the pad with your polish compound and gently spread it on the car surface, one body panel at a time. Place the pad on the car body parallel to its surface and wipe it back and forth with moderate pressure.
With single-stage paint, a faster speed often gives a better finish, but it’s more important to be careful than fast. As the scratches disappear, the color will become brighter on that panel, meaning you can stop and move on to the next part.
As you work through the paint, the color will come off on the pad, so it’ll gum up much faster than a car with clear coat. That’s why it’s important to keep spare pads handy.
Why Clear Coat is Important
The first layer of coating applied on a car’s metal panel is the base coat, also called the primer. This thin layer usually has metal or mica fragments and is spread on the raw frame of a car before the colored paint comes on. Layers of clear coats are then put on the paint to complete the color depth.
The outer clear coat layer gives a sleek glossy finish to your car, but it offers more than aesthetics. Clear coat can help protect the lower paint layer of your car from rain, dust, mild chemicals, and harsh UV radiation from the sun. The clear coat can also stop minor scratches from directly touching the paint and peeling it away.
In the absence of clear coat, paint often becomes less durable. It becomes much easier for the paint layer to peel off, exposing the metal panel barely covered by the base primer. When the metal panel has contact with air and moisture for long, it can rust.
With a protective clear coat on top, it’s much easier for the body of a car to withstand minor abrasions without any obvious damage.
Why Some Cars Have No Clear Coat
Certain types of car paint don’t need clear coat. These paints are called single-stage paint. As the name suggests, single-stage paints don’t need to have layers of colored paint laid first and the clear coat next. Instead, the paint is mixed in with a form of clear coat, so one layer of this paint can fill in the color and gloss.
First published on Sep 18, 2022 by CarCareReport.com.
Two-stage paints with both layers applied differently have recently overtaken single-stage paints in popularity. Until the late 1990s, though, single-stage paints were the standard for car paints. This is why many vintage cars have single-stage paints without clear coat.
What’s So Special About Polishing a Car Without Clear Coat?
Without clear coat, the paint itself (not the colorless top coat) comes off during car polishing. If the polishing is done too harshly, the paint can fade instead of becoming brighter. As the colored layer gets thinner, the base coat or metal panel underneath your car paint may get exposed.
Clear coat is very valuable for maintaining your car’s exterior. During regular polishing, it is slightly melted until it becomes a layer of very thick semi-liquid on your car paint. Then, the melted coat is polished with a compound to remove blemishes slowly until the scratches disappear. In this case, the paint can withstand such roughness of the polishing process because of the coat protecting it.
If nothing is coming off while your car paint gets brighter, you might want to look again –the clear coat is actually coming off in little bits. Because the coat is colorless, it can’t lose its brightness, and the abrasive polishing effect is almost unnoticeable. So instead of fading off, the paint layer gets brighter without any obvious effect on your car.
Things can get trickier when you need to get a polishing done for a car without this protective coat over the paint. With no covering to withstand the abrasion and protect the colored layer, the paint comes off. Preserving just enough paint to restore the shine to your car while keeping the surface durable is delicate business.
Conclusion
Polishing a car can be tedious, especially when it’s one without clear coat. However, watching your car sparkle and shine is more than enough incentive to get it done. If you run into any complications while polishing your car yourself, don’t hesitate to reach out to a professional for help.
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CarCareReport dot com first published this article on Sep 18, 2022..