Can you sand out dust in candy paint

[hotrod59f100]

I spraed my car it's last coat of candy and all of a sudden the wind picked up and got a few dust flecks in my paint. I do not want to strip the paint again. If it can't be sanded then I'll just put it high up on the shelf and call it done.

Edited June 6, 2012 by hotrod59f100

[BKcustoms]

I haven't tried it but I've heard as long as you sand very lightly with high grit paper and sand the entire body evenly you should be fine.

[Ace-Garageguy]

Yes, absolutely positively you can sand it out. Use the very fine sanding pads, and use them WET with plenty of water, and keep cleaning the accumulated gunk out of the pad grit.

Also, every time you go to a finer grit, clean out your water container carefully and get fresh water. Grit particles from, let's say 2400 pads, that come loose during sanding and get suspended in the water will make SCRATCHES when you're sanding with much finer grits like 12,000.

Also be careful when you start to sand out the trash. If it's a little hard thing, it will also make a SCRATCH when it breaks free and gets slid along the car body. Really pay attention to what you're feeling and hearing when you're doing this.

[Art Anderson]

Given that the paint in question is a candy color, sanding out any imperfections without changing the shade of color could be problematic. Candy colors get their depth of color by using more, or less candy paint, due to this sort of paint's transparency. The more color laid down with candies, the darker the color, less color sprayed on, the lighter the shade.

Any sanding, wet or dry, will alter the thickness of the paint used. On solid colors that won't be a problem, However, alter the thickness of a candy color significantly, the shade of color will be lighter in that area than the surrounding surfaces. It's going to take a pretty delicate, careful touch to wet sand out those specks of dirt.

Art

[High octane]

Art is right about sanding the candy color and changing the shade of the color by doing so. Some guys use too many coats of candy paint and then the base coat doesn't show through and it really doesn't look like a candy color any more. So go easy on the number of candy coats for a great look.

[Ace-Garageguy]

Because sanding pads are actually soft sanding "blocks", it is very possible to just knock off the dust nib without changing the shade of the surrounding paint. Yes, you DO have to be very careful.

Candies are extremely difficult to spray and get exactly even coverage anyway. A lot of 1:1 cars have visible stripes in the candy where the build is heavier in some areas, owing to improper overlap of paint gun passes, and there's no way to fix that, but I have sucessfully sanded small dust nibs out of candies. ALL lacquer candies got sanded and buffed back in "the day", and urethane based candies do today.

Whenever you touch a candy color with anything, sandpaper or polish, you risk getting blotches of uneven color. So VERY VERY careful is the rule. Color sanding of a candy color on a crowned panel, the top of a fender for instance, is a scary proposition even without dust in it. But unless you can lay the paint down perfectly slick, which is pretty doubtful in most cases, you're going to have to color-sand anyway to get show-quality paint. Again, because a sanding pad is a "block", it's possible to just kiss the surface and let the bolck shave off the dust nib without going into the surrounding color. Then, colorsand and polish as you would normally.