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Hey, everybody.
Welcome back to our fourth video in our paint defect series.
My name is Kevin Ansell, application engineer for 3M.
In this video, we're going to talk about dirt nibs.
And that's probably the most common imperfection
that we're going to see.
We're going to go over what they are, how they occur,
and what you can do to fix them.
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Before we get started, let's go over a few things.
First, make sure you're wearing your proper PPE whenever you're
using any of these products.
You'll see today, I'm wearing my safety glasses, my hearing
protection, cut resistant gloves,
and a particulate respirator.
Second, this video is intended for occupational use
only like in a body shop or a paint shop.
If you want more information, I posted the link
to our safety and warranty information in the description
below.
Let's get started.
Dirt nibs usually occur whenever there's
dust or debris that is floating around in your paint booth
and it lands on your finished surface.
But also occur if the panel was not properly prepped
before you start applying your paint.
Before we apply our paint, we want
to make sure we're following our paint company recommendations.
We want to make sure that we're properly
cleaning the panel tacking it with a tack cloth,
and then we can get on with the paint application process.
This is probably the number one reason to do paint finishing.
After a panel comes out with clear coat on it,
you get that shiny appearance.
You get that OEM quality that you're trying to achieve.
But if you have just one little speck of dust,
that can derail the whole thing.
You have to remove that so that you don't have that indication
that the panel was replaced.
To do that, what we're going to do
is we're going to start with either a 1500
grit or a 2,000 grit abrasive.
We'll knock down that texture.
We don't want to stand too much because we still
want to mimic that OEM texture and that orange peel
like we talked about in the last video.
We want to blend the surface so that you
don't have any flat spots of where that defect was
when you're doing the repair.
After you're done sanding out all
of your defects and your imperfections,
you can move on with the rest of your paint finishing
process using a finer grit abrasive
and then your compound and polish.
Once again, I'm going to put a strip of tape
along the midpoint of the panel.
All that's doing is just showing the indication
of what the panel looked like before versus
what it will look like after I'm done fixing my dirt nibs.
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OK, so as you can see what I did is
I started off with my 2000 grit and really highlighted
the entire area.
I know that there were a lot of dirt nibs
that were in the surface.
So that was just a way for me to visually see
where those defects were and what areas of the panel
that I needed to focus on.
And once I highlighted where the defects were,
I tilted my DA up on an edge and really just focused
on that small area.
I didn't want to sand too much because I didn't want
to remove any of that texture.
And you can see there are a couple small flat spots.
I tried to blend that into the rest of the area.
So we're not removing too much of that texture.
There's not much of a visual indication
from one section of the panel where
the defect was to the rest of the panel that was ready to go.
So now we have our 2000 grit scratches into the panel.
We can't leave it like this.
Any scratch we put in, we have to remove.
And so now we'll continue on with our paint finishing
process using our 3000 grit abrasive
and go on to our compounding and polishing.
Thank you for watching.
Hopefully, you found this video helpful.
Stay tuned for the next couple of videos
as we dive a little bit deeper into our buffing
and our finishing process.
If you like this video, make sure you give us a thumbs
up, comment in the section below, share and subscribe.
And if you want to see more videos like this,
make sure you check out 3M Collision Repair Academy.
Thank you.
Until next time.
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