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20 years in and I just found out I was using a DA sander completely backwards
I've been doing body work for about 15 years now, started at a little shop outside Phoenix. Last week a new kid came in fresh from trade school and watched me block sand a quarter panel. He asked why I was running the DA in circles instead of straight lines. I told him that's how you get a smooth finish, right? He just pulled out his phone and showed me a video from a 3M training course. I had been cross hatching the wrong way for a decade and a half, leaving micro swirls I was buffing out later. The kid showed me in 5 minutes how running the pattern in straight overlapping passes cut my finishing time by half. Now I feel like a total hack, but my paint jobs have never looked better. Has anyone else had a basic technique flip their whole process upside down this late in the game?
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lucashenderson23d agoOG Member
hold up, i gotta push back here. running a da in straight lines sounds fine on paper but in real shop conditions that's how you get those long scratch marks that show up after clear coat. i've been doing circles since 2008 and my work passes dealer inspection every time. sure, you might spend a little extra time buffing but that's part of the job. straight passes work great when you're sanding primer on a perfect panel but throw some curve or body filler in there and circles actually follow the contour better without digging into spots. also that 3m training video was probably made for guys using their high end paper on perfect flat metal, not real world crash work. just saying.
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sandra_moore3022d ago
Have you actually tried straight passes on a curved panel yourself, or is that just from watching videos?
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carr.luna22d ago
@lucashenderson @sandra_moore30 read a tech article that said circles hide scratches but straight passes cut faster, both have tradeoffs.
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