How to Remove Dust/Hair in Metallic finishes

[DiscoRover007]

Hey guys so I was curious to see if anyone here had methods to removing dust in their paint when using metallic/pearl colors?

I always clear coat  my paints. I've got a pretty good system in place to keep dust out of my paint but of course you get that one speck every now an again. I find its much easier to sand and buff these out with solid colors. However the difficulty comes with metallic colors. I have one example on my bench where I successfully avoided dust in the color coats of paint. However after the second clear coat I discovered a small hair sitting in the paint.

When this has happened in the past I haven't been able to buff these errors out. It seems that A. You sand too much and discolor the base coat. Or B. You sand it out but there is still a "ghost" of the error in the paint even when you polish.  Or C. You sand the error deeper into the paint  So the solution end up being a small respray and re clear of those areas.  However the issue with that is you risk trapping more dust in the respray and discoloration of the metallic color as it is now on top of a clear, on top of a base coat which may change it's depth and reflection.

I wanted to ask you gentlemen here what you usually do in these cases.  I will say I haven't let a body fully cure with these errors before and tried to sand it out. By fully cure I mean a few weeks.  I use TS lacquers and will typically wait a few days or a week before attempting to sand things out.  However I wonder if I let the body harden over a few weeks for example, if just maybe the underlying layers of clear will keep the dust suspended in which I could sand it out without messing with the base color.

[gman]

To avoid the issues you mention, ideally you would wet sand the defect(s) out, smooth out the rest of the paint as best you can, then re-coat the entire model with enough light coats of color to ensure an even finish that hides any discoloration present from sanding out the defect.

[StevenGuthmiller]

I can't remember the last time that I had a metallic paint job that didn't wind up with at least a couple of dust specks in the base coat.

In most circumstances, these speck are small and basically colorless.

I just leave them alone, spray my clear coats over them and let the final polish render them virtually undetectable.

It absolutely beats the alternative of sanding and "smearing" the metallic particles in the paint, and/or attempting what could be endless re-coats.

The likelihood of getting dust specks in concurrent coats is just as high as in the first coat, so where do you stop.

I guess if you really need a "PERFECT" paint job, you might want to obsess about things like this, but I'm absolutely happy with a good paint job where an occasional random dust speck might be detected under magnification.

 

 

 

 

Steve

Edited June 1, 2019 by StevenGuthmiller

[High octane]

Try using a tack rag on your model before any painting, as it seems to help me get a dust free paint job.