Paint Correction for River Hills, Wisconsin

From our shop

About 45 minutes

Price

Quoted per vehicle

First step

Identify the finish

Approach

Conservative

What the paint is decides everything

A modern car has a colour coat under a clear coat, and correction removes a controlled amount of clear. An older car may have single-stage paint — colour and gloss in one layer, no clear at all — which corrects differently, throws colour onto the pad as it is polished, and has no reserve above the colour to work with. Early clear coats from the eighties and nineties are thinner and softer than modern ones and behave differently again. A car that has been repainted has whatever the painter put on it, which may be thick, thin, or uneven panel to panel.

So the first thing we do on a River Hills collector is find out what we are polishing. Paint depth readings across every panel, inspection under focused light, a test spot in an inconspicuous place. Only then is there a plan. Correcting an older finish without that is guessing with something that cannot be replaced.

Conservative by default

A daily driver can afford a correction that takes a little more clear than strictly necessary. A collector cannot, because the goal is for the paint to outlast the current owner and every micron removed now is a micron unavailable to the next correction in fifteen years.

So we correct to the least aggressive level that achieves the result, we stop where the paint says to stop rather than where the defect does, and we tell you when a mark is going to stay because removing it would cost more clear than is responsible. On an older car some marring is history, and the honest answer is that it belongs there.

Protection that suits the finish

After correction, a collector finish needs protection that suits it. Modern coatings work well on modern clear coats and on many older ones; on some single-stage finishes a quality sealant or a traditional wax is the better-matched choice and we will say which. The comparison guide covers the trade-offs.

And a car that goes into storage every November needs to go in corrected, protected and clean, or it comes out with new marks that happened in the dark. Our storage guide is written for exactly this garage. River Hills is forty-five minutes from us and this is the work that justifies it.