Car Cover Setbacks - 09/06/2022
Today I faced a problem I've been aware of for nearly 2 years now. Remember back in 2020 when I kept the car under a 'waterproof' cover for ~7 months?
Well, after 7 months when the cover came off I quickly realized I had some major damage on and around my trunk lid. Its very hard to show on camera, but believe me it's worse in person and extends out to the rear quarter panels:
My understanding of the damage is that water got through the cover and settled on the flatest surfaces (the trunk in this instance). Once that happened the trapped water sat on the trunk clear coats for weeks / months until spots of the clearcoat became saturated with water and took on a cloudy appearance.
Some accounts said the problem might correct itself once the clearcoat had time to outgas. Two Mississippi summers later, it still looks the same :(
I have researched fixes for the issue off and on while doing the overhaul on the car, but never found a sure-fire way of fixing the damage. 1/2 of the cases I found resulted in a repaint whereas the other 1/2 were generally high end detail pros that utilized delicate and proprietary process to reverse the damage. The best I was able to gather was that on the pro side, some were using heat and drying agents and some were strictly polishing. I say strictly polishing, but a byproduct of polishing is lot of heat generated by the high rpm polishing pad + the grit of the polishing compound. So both processes utilized heat in some way.
Last night I figured I had nothing to lose by trying, so I picked a small test spot and went to town using my portland cable orbital, a 3" orange pad, and adams medium grit polishing compound running the orbital @ top speed. After about 20 minutes I was able to make the spot vanish!!! The heat I was generating with the orbital was nowhere near what a rotary tool could do but I was comfortable with it since the chances of burning the paint were minimal. However, after another hour of work I decided I would try adding measured heat from a heat gun + alcohol as a drying agent to see if I could improve my results.
What I ended up doing was wiping down a spot with alcohol for a minute, then immediately put the heatgun on the spot slowly moving it around all while taking heat readings with a IR thermometer. Being careful not to exceed 165F I raised the temperature to see if the cloudiness would dissipate. After a few rounds I couldn't tell much of a difference. What I did notice is that if I went to work with the orbital while the spot was still hot, the spots seemed to clean up quicker.
With that loose process I slowly started working my way across the trunk lid. Here are my results after 3 hours:
The next night I finished up the rest of the trunk lid + the passenger's side quarter. I ended up getting sidetracked with a LED conversion + A IV LCM upgrade / coding job, but eventually got back to the driver's side quarter to put the clear coat issues to bed on 9/13/2022: