clear coat maintainance/repair

[deppstein]

Thanks Chinnin-about for your response. I had followed your post on your repainting of the stripes on your Rig-looks terrific!
My situation is slightly different, given that the area I’m working on is only a small section of the painted “Millenial Swoop” design that transitions into a solid painted section along the bottom panel of my Rig. As best I can tell, that painted grey panel is not clear coated, so I don’t want to create a situation where part of the panel is clearcoated and the rest is not. Consequently, I have decided to buff and wax first to see what it looks like…and, if it turns out that I’m wrong, then I’ll sand the area down again and redo it to finish it with clear coat. May turn out to be more work that way, but I’d rather error on the side of caution. I’ll keep you posted on how it turns out.
David

[deppstein]

So, as promised, I'm circling back to report on the fiberglass repair I did on the lower passenger-side panel back near the rear wheel well. I'm totally happy with the patch itself--done using just gel coat to fill the scratch. It came out smooth tapers well to rest of the panel. I then sprayed a light grey undercoat, followed by a spray can of custom grey color coat, and finally several sprayed layers of clear coat (yes Chinnin, you were right--the clear coat was definitely needed...never should have doubted you!). I then used Griot's Garage Complete Compound to buff it all up...I was looking for a Maguire's product, but couldn't find it close by. The Griot's worked fine...clearcoat buffed up pretty well. That said, the color match is not perfect, so you can see a slight color line between old and new where I had taped things off (that's the consequence of not doing the entire lower panel (which is why the professionals wanted to charge me $1900 for the job). Oh well. It is well protected, and doesn't look too bad. I'll wait a month before taking it to my usual detail guy for a professional application of wax, as suggested. I'm imagining it will get less noticeable with time, not more. So--bottom line, I can definitely live with it...gonna think of it as the sort of beauty mark that comes with age and good use! Pics of what it looks like now attached.
David