Paint Clarity

[Too Stroked]

I noticed something interesting the other day when I was (finally) doing some detailing work on my daily driver Scion xB. Understand that the car has a really neat color (Dark Cherry) that on most xB's looks like just plain Maroon. Now mine is pretty well taken care of, but had gone since last December without any serious detailing work. That brings us to the subject of this post - clarity.

When I started working on it the other day, I noticed that the surface had some very minor oxidation and micro-marring. Quite normal after 4 months of "neglect." What I didn't notice was much orange peel or metallic in the paint. In short, I didn't think the thing looked half bad. (OK, so it's an ugly car, but it has neat paint.) Then I went at it with my PC set on 6 using a CCS White pad and Meg's M205. What I noticed after only a few passes was a much deeper shine and the metallic really popped out of the paint. After the #16, the depth and shine was incredible - and so was the orange peel. So what happened?

I did some checking around and here's the simple truth. When you have scratches in the paint surface, they reflect light back at the light source (and your eye) at thousands of different angles. This diffuses the light and kind of mutes the image. Think of it as looking through an old "fluted" headlight lens as opposed to many newer headlights where the light is aimed by the reflector and the lens is clear. Notice how different the headlight looks? Then there's the metallic flakes in the paint. They're at all different angles themselves, and theoretically should reflect light at all sorts of angles too. But, when you put it through a fluted lens, the clarity gets lost.

This all brings me back to clarity. If you detail a vehicle correctly, you'll remove defects (paint correction) and therefore gain clarity. That clarity is awesome. (Just look at JP's F-250 and you'll see what perfection looks like.) But, JP has a finish pretty much free of orange peel. Now my Toaster has a bit of orange peel and it shows up much worse when the vehicle is polished correctly. Why? Because it's not hidden / masked by anything else right now. All in all though, I'll take the clarity any day of the week!