At what point do you say "screw it" and strip the paint?
I have a pretty basic black car (2016 Hyundai Accent) with bad clear coat on the roof and can't spend the money to get it professionally done.
Clear coat was already bad when I bought it a few months back so I sanded down the roof and applied 2 new coats. Within about 4 weeks, the new coats started going white and it now, 2 months later, it looks worse than before. I have successfully recoated a few panels using the same method on a previous car and I'm not really sure what I did wrong here.
Either way, instead of trying to sand down the clear coat again and likely damaging the paint underneath, I'm tempted to think it might save me a lot of time to just use a paint stripper and take off the failed clear coat job with the paint altogether. I already cut through the clear to the first layer of paint in a couple spots the first time and just threw the clear over it - it looked fine until the entire thing started going white.
Am I a moron for thinking it could be a better route to just start from scratch instead of sanding away again? If so, can someone tell me what would make more sense as a solution and why?
Right now I'm leaning towards chemically stripping, scraping, sanding, then primer, paint and clear coat. Just a simple black (I'll find the right match) and it really doesn't need to look perfect. I appreciate your thoughts on this.
The whitening is worse than it looks in the photo.
Posted Jul 9, 2025, 4:05 AM UTC