Talk Morgan Forums Morgan Sports Cars Morgan Three Wheeler & Super 3 Polishing a hand-painted Morgan!

Just finished my winter re-paint of my '33 SS, hand-painted of course. The finish is great albeit with the inevitable dust specks. Is there a 'best' way to remove or polish them out? Previously I'd have left it as is, but is polishing an option to clean the finish up?

You could try using a paint restoration kit typically for heavily oxidised surfaces. Various grades of paste, machine applied until desired finish is achieved.

Is the finish cellulose or enamel?
If enamel I would leave for a good 6 months before polishing.

There are small files called nib files still readily available and relatively inexpensively from Eastwood, or on Amazon that are useful for removing high spots such as runs, dust, or embedded bugs. Then you flat the surface with progressively finer grades of paper, something like 600/800/1000, before polishing/waxing with your favorite compounds. As its a Morgan and not a Buick, the work involved, while not trivial, isn't too great. And it's a fairly authentic pre-war painting process, though I imagine you used modern materials.

The first/only car I painted by hand was in c1972. It was a (fibreglass-bodied) Fairthorpe Electron Minor, which I had inadvertently run into the back of a bus in Uxbridge (note to self: fix the brakes). After repairing the fibreglass and carefully flatting/prepping the surface, I used royal blue coach paint. After just 2 coats applied by roller outdoors, it looked pretty darned good. To get the finish I wanted, I used the grades of wet-and-dry as suggested by Bitsobrits, and then 2000 grade. In the 50 years since, as well as working on my cars I have hand-painted many R/C model aircraft, and used the same finishing technique (and won awards). Things to remember:
-- just to endorse Jack & Jill 602, wait until the paint is hard-dry, otherwise you WILL make a mess of it;
-- having painted the car by hand, finish it by hand: rotary polishers/MOPs are tempting but it is sooooo easy to go through to the underlying surface, and you can waste a lot of time going away and having a good cry;
-- polish simply makes the finish shiny; you do need to use a very very fine abrasive of some sort to remove those annoying "nibs" and achieve a uniformly smooth surface to polish;
-- beware "swirl marks" which are typically the result of using sub-optimal polishing cloths; always use good quality micro-fibre cloths.
Keep at it and I'm sure you will achieve a showroom-grade finish. Good luck !

Actually polishing is part of the paint prep process it is wax or the more modern equivalents that make the paint shiny.

Detailing World has more info about paint prep than any sane man could wish for.

I stand corrected. Poor semantics, yes wax not polish for the shine on paint. Shoe polish is wax. Beeswax for wood is... polish ? There's probably another tier of terminologies for "polishing" chrome and stainless. And aluminium and magnesium. And copper and brass. And glass and Plexiglas.
(And yes Polish is a language too -- that's an idea for a book title if it hasn't been done already: "The language of polish").

Forgive me if this sounds a bit bonkers but, when I did a Boatbuilding course a few centuries ago, we were taught how to remove dust specks from the final coat of gloss varnish.

The method is to use the REVERSE side of a piece of sandpaper - grade seems unimportant. Start with light strokes and increase pressure if necessary. Never tried on paint but it certainly works on all types of varnish.

P.S. This is not 1 April!

^^ You are quite right - When I was an apprentice (many moons ago) we used brown wrapping paper as a final polishing medium on some of our lathe turned items.

Not bonkers at all, I remember a painter showing me this about 40 yrs ago, trick of the trade.