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VI. Resin application (continued)
After my second layer, I let the car sit overnight before beginning with sanding. This was due to other commitments taking up my time.
This is where you will sand off the excess from your resin layers in an attempt to make it as smooth and flat as possible. In my case, I made a mistake where I let a bit of epoxy that had just started to gel get on the roof. And this made a bit of a gooey mess. I was able to somewhat level that section (about 2 inches by 8 inches right in the middle of the roof). Once the resin dried, though, you could see the wavy lump of excess resin in the middle. Hopefully this doesn’t happen to you, but if it does, you just have to take your time, sand it and level it out.
For this stage I started dry sanding with 220 grits with light pressure to take off the easy stuff. After that I went progressively lighter in grit (320, 400, 600, 800) using tons of water for wet sanding. The importance of doing mostly wet sanding here, is so that you can tell by the color of the liquid being sanded off that you are not back to the level of the CF itself. The resin while being removed should look grayish (because of the tint) or milky. Easy and steady does it.
After each grit, use a damp microfiber towel to wipe off the residue and the compressor to dry out the area and check your work. You should be seeing the CF pattern with no obvious high spots (too much resin and it will look like a lump) or low spots (not enough resin and it will look like exposed CF weave). In my case I had to do a ton of sanding on that center section to get rid of the excess but I was hesitant towards the end and didn’t flatten it 100%. Once you’re up to 800, clean everything, dry everything up.
At this point you want to use your panel prep or alcohol mix and give the roof a good cleaning, ensuring there are no major marks, streaks and such. This is to get ready to apply clearcoat. In the end, your roof should look as in the pic below.
If you haven’t done so already, go ahead and fully mask the rest of the car using plastic sheeting. If you’re doing this in your garage, make sure you park your other cars outside and don’t leave anything around which can get overspray on it.
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