long story short, i had some some wheel well work and some stuff painted on my '08 mazdaspeed3. the shop that did the original work was a complete nightmare, and i had to battle to get my money back, which i did. thread is here if you care - https://honda-tech.com/forums/paint-body-84/handling-nibs-such-2575886/

anyway, i had the paintwork redone by a friend's shop and they did a fantastic job. the hood was repainted as well and it ended up with some bubbles in two lines, each about two inches near the cowl, closest to the windscreen. they look like your prototypical solvent pop. i was ok with it because it was so minimal, and the work otherwise was awesome. i drove the car here and there, on occassion over the course of a couple months, and always parked it in my garage under fluorescents, inspecting it to assure it was still fine. and it was for the remainder of the summer. but after parking it in the garage for over a month (late sept to only a few days ago) and not driving it at all while the weather was cooling down, i noticed additional bubbles popping up in lines, and in 'fields', small sections of super tiny bubbles. the odd thing is, like i said, these popped up suddenly after a couple months since the work was done.

i called my guy, and he said it's probably a warranty issue and he'd like to see it. either way he said they will redo it, but he still needs to see it. i told him it might be hard unless it's under artificial light, and he agreed to come to my house, but i gave it a shot anyway and drove it to his shop. sure enough, we could barely see anything but the original two lines of bubbles, the ones i was orig. willing to ignore. well, sure enough, i pull the car in the garage, and the damn bubbles, the tiny ones that popped up after a month of sitting, are gone!? so i let the car sit over the weekend, and they are back.

he's going to stop over this week sometime and i'm not driving it.

my questions are- wtf is going on here? it's SO long after the fact, how would a solvent trap issue still be occuring? and also, why would it pop up when the hood has cooled completely, as opposed to when it's heated up from driving? i'd think it would be the opposite.

for what it's worth, they took the hood completely down from the work that the first shop did, as he used Glasurit but had TONS of tiger stripes, nibs, etc as well as unprepped chips. garbage work, so they had to take it down. also, my guy's shop uses exclusively Diamont.

this perplexes me mainly because i'd think anything that would have occured, would have been over and done with at this point- this back and forth, bubbles coming and going has got be really confused.

 

here are some pics- it's SUPER hard for me to accurately shoot them because of the color of the car, and also i'm using a middle of the road point-n-shoot. keep in mind these are in patches and lines and i could only get pics of a very limited amount of what's actually there.

 

does look like solvent poppings. They're going to keep popping up, cause water possibly got in the line while the paint was being sprayed, or something in the paint itself didn't mix right together which causes it paint to not cure correctly and never dry. The clear coat will dry, but the paint itself under it won't dry, so it's fighting for any air pockets

 

Thats dribbles off the end of the gun. Or something that was sprayed in the shop IE wd40, silicone spray. Hard to tell with out touching it but it looks like its under the clear.
Most likely its because of a improperly cleaned gun. Bummer, make them fix it.

 

what's crazy is if i let the car sit for a couple weeks without driving it, they come back. if i drive it, many of the little 'fields' of bubbles disappear. i wish i could take accurate pictures of what it really looks like right now, that the car has been sitting for a couple weeks...it's amazing haha

i'm still waiting for the guy to come by my house to see this ****. quite annoying because it's making it so i can't drive the car. i want to assure it looks as bad as it's going to look when he comes by, so the car will sit until he comes.

 

so my guy stopped by the other night. he said it def looks like a warranty issue. he said they will ask if he tried to wet sand further so he will try that tomorrow and we will leave it over the weekend to see what shows up. i called him and said i'm not very confident that this will do anything, and i'm sure it will have to be repainted, but he said it doesn't matter as they will ask if he attempted to sand it first...

the cool thing is BASF pays them rather well for warranty stuff so it's not a real hassle.

he told me to circle the areas with china pencil...pretty amazing once i marked them up!

 

oh my

 

well, i finally got my car back and man, the hood is IMMACULATE. BASF didn't get back to them yet re: warranty, but they said do not worry about it they are going to warranty their work no matter what.

 

sounds like a very good shop you're dealing with.

 

Def looks like contamination of some sort. If thats the case BASF def wont warranty it since it wasnt the product but the end user. Def a stand up shop though to redo the work. Most will tell you they cant see it lol.

 

bro did you ever get your $ back from the first shop? I just read that whole thread...says here you did but on the last thread you were still fighting. just curious