Dropping your car for correction: what to expect
From the inspection to the walk-round under lights: what happens over the two days your car is with us.
Why we measure paint before we polish
Clear coat is thinner than a sheet of paper. How a paint gauge decides how far we can safely correct each panel.
Before any polisher touches a car in our bay, Imran walks round it with a paint thickness gauge and reads every panel. Customers sometimes think this is for show. It is the most important ten minutes of the job.
A modern car’s paint is built in layers: primer, colour and a clear coat on top. The whole stack on most cars sold in India is between 90 and 140 microns thick, and the clear coat, which is the only layer we polish, is usually 35 to 50 microns. A sheet of printer paper is about 100. Paint correction removes swirls by levelling a few microns of that clear coat. Take off too much and the clear coat fails, and the only fix is a repaint.
The gauge tells us three things. First, how much clear coat there is to work with on each panel. Second, which panels have been repainted, because those read much thicker or uneven, and repaint is often softer and needs gentler pads. Third, where previous polishing has already thinned the paint, often on the edges of the bonnet and roof.
We write every reading on a diagram of the car and show it to you before we agree the quote. If a panel is too thin for full correction, we tell you and polish it lightly instead. After correction, we measure again, so you know exactly how much was removed. Most cars lose two to four microns.
