Awesome job Jay , I now realise why Tom was going nowhere near it with a dirty rag on Sun @ Santa Pod
In terms of lacquer thickness etc , how much is generally taken off?
Well in this case, i probably took up to 8-10 microns off toms in case, based upon toms insistence on a near 100% job. Add that to how deep the scratches were, that's more than i like to take off.
ordinarily id take off 3-5 for a near 100% job.
You do get to a point where you HAVE to think...right, 95% of the marks are gone, you will hardly see the rest under normal conditions. the car will look 300% better. To get the last 5% of the defects out, you have to remove the same amount again from the clearcoat. ie ther than 3-5 microns, you looking at 8-10.
so based on a normal coat of 120 microns (ish) thats about 4% of the paint removed on a normal detail
Its all to do with that the customer wants. tom was insistant he wanted a 20 hour job, rather than the usual 12-15 hours