Following the return of the newly upholstered body, I commenced polishing out some of the orange peel finish in the green paint. I blame the orange peel (bumpy texture) partly on my inexperience as a painter and partly on the $14 Harbor Freight spray gun that refused to shut off 3/4 of the way through the spray job back on July 27, 2020.  You move fast and carefully when the trigger is stuck ON.

I used several types of buffers and compounds to remove the orange peel.  Chief among the equipment was a 5.5″ denim (yes, just like Levi’s jeans) with Meguiar’s M100 Pro Speed Compound. This was on a Bauer (HF) dual action polisher that operates from 2000 – 6400 rpm. The denim & the M100 really cut the high spots down. The denim loaded up with spent cleaner & paint in about 2 applications of cleaner and needed to be cleaned out frequently. This was done with a soft nylon brush in warm running water.  My main complaint is that the adhesive for the denim to the foam disk was NOT up to repeated washings and soon started to delaminate. Another potential problem was that high areas had to be taped so that I didn’t scrub through the layer of green paint. That worked pretty well by taping the high spots with blue masking tape. I also did some block sanding with 1000 and 1500 grit sand paper that worked pretty well in big flat areas.

Sanded, buffed & polished.

The result looks pretty nice (not perfect) but, hey I’m new at this.