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Fighting A Black Paint Job – Paint Imperfections and Swirls




If you ever painted a black car, then you know all of the all of the issues that comes with it. Not only does it show every imperfection; it is also very difficult to cut and polish.  You spend twice as long to remove all of the smudges.  Then after the final wash you find several areas that need additional buffing.  Learn what we discovered to make this a simple task.

This is a few common problems we have when working with black.  If you have a system that works well, please leave us a comment.  Here is what we discovered well.

We just repaired a VW hail damage job.  And of course, it was a complete paint job.  The body work looked great, but it did have a little trash and orange peel.  We decided to go ahead and cut and polish the entire car.  Below are the steps we took to get this car looking great.

  1. Tape the edges off to prevent sanding through edged and/or getting compounds in all of the cracks and gaps.
  2. Sanded the paint surface with 1200 grit on a DA with an inner face soft pad.
  3. Sanded the paint surface with 1500 grit on a DA with an inner face soft pad.
  4. Sanded the paint surface with 3000 grit on a DA with an inner surface soft pad.
  5. Compounded the paint surface with #1 3m compound.
  6. Polished the paint surface with #2 3M polish.

For light colors; you would be finished, but black and other dark colors take an additional step

  • Polish the paint surface with #3 3M polish.

Next, we wash the car to get it ready for the customer.  However, with the color being black, we found a few areas that still needed buffed, as we did not get it good enough the first time.  This requires going through the 3 3M steps again.  The problem is that we are going to make a huge mess slinging compounds and polish, which may require rewashing the car.

Quick Fix Tip

Instead of grabbing the buffer back out, we decided to try the new 3M denibber system.  We used the denibbing #1 compound on the areas that required additional buffing.  Then we used the #2 denibbing polish.  Wiped the areas clean and it looked great.  Best of all, no mess.  This system is small and does not sling product like traditional buffing does.  This eliminated the need to re-masks edges and jambs where needed and rewashing the entire car.

The denibbing system works well for small dirt nibs, but I think I am more impressed with how easy it is to touch up missed spots as we did on this black VW.

So I give a thumbs up for the 3M denibbing system….a life saver on black paint jobs.

Here is product information about the 3M buffing systems.