Loading…
10
Blew 3 hours sanding a fender at the shop in Tucson because my air pressure was too high the whole time
I was chasing sand scratches on a 2019 Civic fender last Thursday and kept going finer and finer with the paper. My boss Ray walked over, glanced at my regulator, and said it was cranked up to 90 psi, which was loading the paper and gouging the primer instead of cutting it. Dropped it to 40 and the same 320 grit started cutting clean in half the passes. Now I check the gauge before I even touch the panel, but I'm wondering what other basics I've been sleeping on, what's the one dumb thing you caught yourself doing after way too long?
2 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In2 Comments
robert_roberts26d ago
Did you also spend years wiping panels with a dirty rag and calling it "tack cloth"? I once spent a whole afternoon fighting fish eyes before Ray pointed at the can of silicone spray sitting on my bench.
8
the_jake26d ago
Did you know that silicone spray can travel across a whole shop and still mess up your paint days later? That stuff gets into the air and lands on everything, so even if you sprayed it on the other side of the garage you're still gonna get fish eyes. Learned that the hard way after Ray caught me too, except my problem was the WD-40 I'd been using to clean my hands before grabbing the panels. Now I keep a real tack cloth in a ziplock bag and I don't touch anything with bare hands once the primer is mixed. Fish eyes will make you crazy because you can't see the contamination until the paint lays down and then it's too late to do anything but sand it all back off. The dirty rag thing gets everybody at least once.
6