overspray, paint, matte, removing

Removing Overspray from a Matte Black Harley Davidson

Overspray from a construction site littered a matte black Harley Davidson the other day. Needless to say, that’s no way to ride around the city and show off such an awesome bike.  Luckily we got our hands on the bike and were able to restore it back to it’s original clean factory look. Contaminants like overspray, sap, road grime, and tar are relatively difficult to remove from any surface.  Especially when dealing with a matte finish, rubbing the paint to try and remove the spots is deadly to the look of the finish.  With any tough to remove blemish on a matte vehicle, breaking it down chemically first is absolutely necessary to preserve the paint.  This will soften the contaminants and allow them to be easy to remove with a soft microfiber towel.

For this particular case, we used a matte specific paint cleanser that works for these types of contaminants. We simply applied the cleanser to a single section of the bike at a time and allowed it to dwell on the surface for 5-10 minutes. We didn’t want the cleanser to dry on the surface while it was dwelling so we continued to saturate the area. When we were ready to remove the cleanser, we took a microfiber towel and dried the surface. Most of the spots came out on the first go around, but some spots were more stubborn than others and required a little more cleanser.

Generally, a few applications is sufficient enough to break down and soften the contaminants enough to be safely removed from the paint without leaving marks behind. Once all the spots were removed, we washed the motorcycle again and reapplied the matte coating.  The turnaround on the bike took no more than 30 minutes and the before and after was drastic!

If you have any questions on removing spots or blemishes from matte finishes, please feel free to leave us a comment here or e-mail us; we’re more than happy to help you resolve your issue.

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