Hey, I just started painting a few months ago with relatively no experience, after seeing body shops, hours of homework online and many trips to the library I felt confident enough to attempt my friend’s reconstructed car. The results were, good... to our standards. As in anything the more you do something the better your skills become. We learned not more then a week later that I improperly prepped the raw plastic front bumper and the paint peeled off in sheets, learning from my mistakes if offered to repaint the bumper again for free. This time around the prep and paint were much better then last time, but when it came to clear coat I ran into some problems. I laid 3 med. coats of Nason Select Clear on top of the Abyss 2 tone color shifting Green from Nissan, And when I got done there was bumps, small but they still scattered the light so that any reflection looked like the blurry spots on cops. When this happened I figured I could just cut the top layers of clear down with 1500 & 2000 grit paper and buff it out, well my theory was right (or so I think) on one part but when I went to do this on the whole bumper I got little bumps of primer. What Happen?
My idea is that when I prepped the bumper I sanded it stepping down from 80, 120, 200 all the way to 600 to make sure I got all the contaminants and scratches out of the plastic. And primed it I made the mistake of not sanding the primer down. When I made this simple mistake the dust particles that made the slight bumps in the primer would endow the high points I would run into after I had laid the color.
Would it be alright if next time after I sand the bumper down to prime it, sand the primer smooth, clean off, prime again if necessary, clean off, then lay 1st coat of color, sand any high spots, clean off, lay my 2nd 3rd and maybe 4th coat of color, (can you do a 1500 grit sand in here to remove dust particles?) then lay 2-4 coats of med. clear making sure my gun is shooting an even layers of clear, then wet sand with 1500 & 2000 grit paper till there are no of the small pits then buff with 3M buffing compound and finish.
Thank you for reading my novel any suggestions, references or help is greatly appreciated.