Restoring a car's paint.

[Erick]

Hey guys, I'm looking at an e30 for sale that has some paint flaws and I was wondering if these could be recovered without having to repaint the whole car.

The car has the paint faded on the quarter panel behind the passenger door and the passenger door itself has some of the clear coat stripping from the key locks.

Also, on the C pillar of the driver's side, there is a white mark.... looks like it was sanded down to that. It's proably 1 inch long by 1/4 of an inch. The car is black so I guess it stands out.

How repairable are these things? I'm still skeptical of paying what the guy is asking if I'm going to have to live with these things.

I'm thinking maybe a good wax can recover the faded paint, but those 2 marks ( the clear coat and the sanded ) wont go away so easily. My real question is on the clear coat, which seems that it will keep peeling out in the future.

[Jordan]

The peeling clearcoat is from a piss poor respray, the lock was masked around, rather then removed.

The faded area is an area that was never repainted when the rest was. It can most likely be "recovered" from a professional cut & polish.

The sanded mark, who knows. Sounds like it needs to be repainted.

Only way to properly fix a mess like that IMO is to gut the car and do a completely respray everywhere.

[Erick]

Excluiding from the clear coat, that's what I figured.

Oh well... not worth the hassle then I guess.