so i got a duckbill for my hatch and the guy did a kinda crappy job painting it
he grabbed it while it was still wet and left a bunch of finger prints. i want to take the paint off to show the c/f again
anyone have any imput on this cause i dont wanna ruin the c/f
the guy i got it from said there was a thing i can get that can just take off the top layer of paint
any ideas?

 

UNless you have a paint thickness gauge to measure how much clearcoat you have to play with, I would go the safer route and take out the buffer with a cutting pad and compound, then follow up with some finishing polish and a white polishing pad to restore its gloss. Keep going with the compound until the fingerprints go away.

Otherwise if you're certain there's a good amount of clearcoat left, go ahead and wetsand, but you will have to compound and polish after anyway.

 

A mil gauge will do nothing for this guy, its carbon fiber. The paint is also hardened so a wet mil gauge will also not work. The most common way to accurately mil gauge clear to use it before and after the clear.

 

He doesn't want to buff it, he wants to take the paint off and go back to carbon fiber.........

I don't think you can get the paint off without damaging the resin on top of the carbon fiber. I suggest buff out the prints, as noted above, sell it and get the one you want.

 

If the paint is fresh enough it will come off with solvent, try some thinner first. Since the part should be cleared anyway for protection, sanding the resin would remove whats left. CF resin is some extremely tough stuff, scuffing it up won't matter if you clear over it..

 

Get it media blasted then re-clear it.

 

just buy a new one and save youre self the hasle trying to remove the paint is work and its probably not going to look thgat good just sell it and buy a new one carbon fiber is pretty delicate

 

i say just use paint stripper and take off all paint and clear coat, sand it with 800 grit or better then just re-clear coat it. its going to be hard to take out just the paint without doing something to the clear coat. i had to do the same to my carbon fiber hood, clear coat was cracked and had paint in alot of area and had to strip all of it out.

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by ek-g6 &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">i say just use paint stripper and take off all paint and clear coat, sand it with 800 grit or better then just re-clear coat it. its going to be hard to take out just the paint without doing something to the clear coat. i had to do the same to my carbon fiber hood, clear coat was cracked and had paint in alot of area and had to strip all of it out. </TD></TR></TABLE>

why would you want to chemical stripe the clear coat?

the resin and all the crap is sandwich there and you'll have a hell of a time to clean up the mess if the striping agent go too deep. it's not like you have a metal that you can bondo over it and hide that thing.

to the op: just cut it and buff it first, if it still doesn't clean it up to wetsand it down and re cc it. i doubt there's any CC on most of the cheap cf stuff, it's just a thin gelcoat and that's all you get