Appreciate the feedback, I found a picture I took a while back that shows the worst of it. I don't think it can get worse then this. Now keep in mind I purchased the car knowing I'd be repainting it sometime down the road. I'm looking to see if I can hang off for a bit before I get into the inevidable.
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My 88 looked close to that before I went at it. The results are in my post above.
For that kind of paint correction, you’re not going to get it clean with an orbital and compound. You’ll get it better, but not as good as it can be. You need a rotary buffer for that since there's some serious cutting needed there.
But, i don’t recommend a rotary to beginners. They can do amazing work, but they can also do amazing damage if used wrong.
Honestly, unless you have at least
SOME experience at paint correction, I’d pay a professional to go over that paint. Pics can be deceiving, but that looks like some pretty serious paint damage. It actually looks like there’s stuff there a pro won’t be able to do much about, without using touch up.
Then you can use your orbital to keep it nice. At least until you can afford a re-spray.
Here's some before/after on mine where it was the most damaged:
Paint fill and wet sand:
Buffed:
Still not perfect, but miles better than before.
With the damages that seems apparent in your pic you are going to need touch up, which means you will also need to wet sand:
And then a full buff:
That hood work wasn't a paint touch up either, it was scratch removal. Sometimes you have to sand, compound just isn’t aggressive enough. It can hide a scratch (at least if you don’t know it’s there) for a while, but it will always come back unless you sand it even with the surrounding clear. A buffer can’t do that because you can’t specifically hit
just the scratch. The buffer hits the scratch and the surrounding paint, so it’s very hard (near impossible) to blend a deep scratch with just compound and buffer.