that is all....

I spent 14 hrs this weekend claybarring tiny "rail dust" rust specs off my truck. The truck looks absolutely stunning but I'll never do it again. Anybody have a better solution for removing these? If they come back, I'm thinking it might be easier to just trade the truck in.

I was told buffing, polishing, and IronX just moves the particles around and doesn't remove them. Any tips?

 

Wow, I found that claybarring was super easy! Takes me like 10 minutes before a polish, even if there's rail dust on the truck. Just do it more often and you shouldn't have issues.

 

The first is the hardest, it gets easier from there.

 

Wow. Who told you that? I've seen iron x work. It does not just move particles around, you can actually see the rail dust dissolve.

 

You own a white truck! You will get little orange dots that the rest of cant see so well. This fallout is from rail dust, and most likely from the streets of MI. I have this hypothesis that the trucks in the winter climes with snow plows will get more iron particles on the paint than southern climes. The snow plow blades leave fine iron particles on the ground that are flung up on the tail gates, and places behind wheels.

You can clay all you want and this stuff will come back. You can use Iron X and it will still come back.

However, Iron x will greatly help speed the process of decon the paint of these pesky particles that attach to your paint. Something is strange about taking 14hrs to clay the truck, ive had some very very bad jobs and it took 1/4 of that time.

I suggest you look into IronX as you have the white truck in a clime of snow plows.

Cheers,
GREG

 

I will have to look into this when I get back from vacation. Having a 10 year old truck in Minnesota really takes it toll on the paint.

 

14 hours? I clay'd my truck, then polished it then waxed it with 3 layers of wax and it took 6 hours. The Claying only took 1.5 hours.

 

Everything is clayed and waxed except the tailgate. I'll pick up some IronX and see how it does. I definitely agree it's from the snowplow blades. The majority of it was on the rockers behind the front tires.

It took me so long because I wasn't able to use the clay bar as you normally would. i.e. roll it into a ball, smush it flat then rub on paint with little to no pressure. Folding as necessary. I could do this all day and it wouldn't even phase the rust spots. Maybe I wasn't using an aggressive enough clay bar? I used Griot's Paint Cleaning Clay with Speed Shine for the lube.

I basically had to embed my fingernails in the clay and sort of scratch off each individual spec of rust. My fingernail wasn't actually touching the paint but it took a lot of centralized force on the clay to remove the spec of metal. I'm surprised my paint didn't mar at all.

 

Your bar was not abrasive enough. Most retail store clay bars are very very very safe to use on paint as the last thing the mfg wants is the end user to screw their paint up. However, there are still bars out there that are more aggressive and still safe for the do it yourselfer. After I bar the vehicle I still use a polish with abrasive in it which will get the last of the contaminants out of the paint. Again, most polishes do not have abrasives (chemical based cleaners) but you should use one that does like Meguiars Ultimate polish. The type of polish you want is one that the abrasive does not diminish when rubbing or using a wheel. Meguiars calls this SMAT technology.