Nothing makes a car look better than a new paint job, and if it’s applied correctly and maintained, the paint will last a long time. But if the car is driven at all, the paint will eventually fade. Or if you’re buying a used street machine, you may be faced with the problem of faded paint. A good paint job can easily cost more than $1000, but there is a low-buck way to put some life into old, faded paint, and that’s by rubbing it out. This involves using compounds, chemicals and lots of elbow grease (unless you have an orbital buffer) to remove the oxidized top layer of paint and then polish it. To find out which chemicals to use and how to use them, we took a severely faded ’65 Mustang to Mothers Waxes and conned the folks there into making it shine for us. As you’ll see, breathing new life into old paint is easy.
