Clear Coat Removal?

P

pa2000xxxx

I’ll try to keep this short. There’s a lot of background but basically I have a car I’m restoring and it was base cleared about a year ago. There are multiple areas in the base coat I want to respray. The clear coat is matte clear if that makes a difference. My question is what’s the best way to go about this? Should I wetsand the whole thing? In a perfect world I’d remove just the clear. If the whole car has to be recleared I’m ok with that.
 
It's not really possible to just remove clear, nor would it be particularly desirable, since you would then have sanded base that would need to be re-based before clear anyway.

Unless you do a test on one panel with spotting in base then clearing it to see how it looks, the safest course of action is to sand the whole vehicle and just base/clear the whole thing, that way the matte clear will be covered uniformly by basecoat and can't affect the appearance of the final finish.

Is the clear going to be matte finish again? I might have to change what I said, I was thinking you were going to gloss clear.
 
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It's not really possible to just remove clear, nor would it be particularly desirable, since you would then have sanded base that would need to be re-based before clear anyway.

Unless you do a test on one panel with spotting in base then clearing it to see how it looks, the safest course of action is to sand the whole vehicle and just base/clear the whole thing, that way the matte clear will be covered uniformly by basecoat and can't affect the appearance of the final finish.

Is the clear going to be matte finish again? I might have to change what I said, I was thinking you were going to gloss clear.

It will be matte or flat, nothing gloss.
 
I'm curious to know why you want to remove the clear. I think you just need to sand the vehicle down, spot in your repairs with base, and re-clear it. You can try to confine the repair to panels, but that assumes you can match the gloss level exactly.
 
Did you use spi matte clear or some other clear adding in a flattner? With spi matte clear you can go between 4 to 1 and 8 to 1 with the activator which varies the flatness level. All flattners settle in mix quickly and gloss level can be affected by improper flash times. Also can take 12 to 48 hours to reach final full flatness level, something to be patient on if doing a sample spray to check gloss level. Not your original question, but a few important things to consider. Personally I wouldn't reclear all panels if not needed.
 
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