Whoo ....
I have not put a single spot of wax on top of any bike I have painted in the last 10 years and I tell every single one of my customers that not only is there no reason at all to wax their bike but that in fact they should never wax their bike. If you were a bike painter you would hate wax as much as I do.
OK, how to cut and buff a paint job. I know this may sound odd to you but this is actually my favorite part of painting a bike - I love to cut and buff.
Cutting and buffing is just a continuation of the sanding process that was begun back when you were finishing up your prep work on the paint job. You follow the same basic principle of going from coarser abrasives to finer. This extends all the way to buffing compounds (you will use two or three different compounds of to do the job.
How to do it? You start with well set paint that needs to be cut and buffed. All paint jobs do not require cutting and buffing. If you have no dust in the paint, no sags, no runs, and no orange-peel then there is no reason to cut and buff the piece. Of course if you don't have a paint booth or the skills/equipment necessary to shoot a perfect job off the gun then you'll either have to put up with flaws or cut and buff. Very few part time painters come up with a perfect job off the gun. By the way, normally you'd shoot about 3 coats of clear, but if you haven't done this before it won't hurt a thing if you were to shoot 4 or 5 coats on the part.
You start with a well set up piece. While most clear coats can be sanded about 24 hours after the last coat has been laid on its generally better to wait a little longer. I personally like to give them 2 to 3 days to off-gas before I start sanding. The reason for this wait is that clear coat, much like concrete, takes some time to fully set up. By waiting an additional day or two you get a base that is just a little bit harder to sand through - not a bad thing for fellows who don't do this often.
Sanding:
UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCE SHOULD YOU EVER TRY TO SAND CLEAR COAT WITHOUT A SANDING BLOCK - NO BLOCK NO SANDING.
Back when you were preping you sanded you final coat of high build with about 400p paper (if you did it right). Then you shot your sealer, color coats, and finally clear coated it. Now because of trash (dust, bugs, sags, runs) in the clear and the dreaded "orange peel" you have to smooth it back out to completely flat and smooth before your buff it to a perfect shine. You do not have to, and in fact you will be wasting tremendous amounts of time and effort, start sanding with extremely fine sand paper. Start with paper somewhere in the 800p grit level and will end up, at about 1500p ~2000p. There is never any reason to go any higher than 2000p, it won't make the job look any better or offer any other benefits.
Sand with water, never let the surface dry. I personally like to use a 5-gallon bucket with soapy water in it as well as a water hose for frequent flushing. Put just a very little bit of liquid dish soap in your water, it stops the sand paper from loading up and makes the job a whole lot easier. Keep your working surface wet all the time.
Begin sanding by first soaking your paper, give it 20 minutes in the bucket before you even try to wrap it around your sanding block. Take your 800P and very quickly make one sanding pass over the part - let's say the tank. Sand the tank until you have dulled the surface of the tank such that about 75% of the shine is gone. What you will notice immediately is that on the very first sanding strokes that gets its top knocked off will be dust nibs, bug wings, and two or three strands of hair that fell out of your head and landed in the clear. You will also see immediately where your sags and runs are. Give them special and extremely careful attention right now with the coarser paper; flatten them out. When you've dulled about 3/4 of the surface with the 800p grit change your paper and move up to 1000p grit. This paper needs to be soaked first too - all wet/dry paper needs to be soaked before you use it. With your 1000p grit paper you beging focusing in on specific problem areas. All the shinney spots are problem (low) areas and of course any dust nibs will look like little round pimples by this stage of the game. Now comes the good part. Sanding very carefully you need to address every single flaw in the surface. Making one swipe at a time - and never pressing down hard on the paper (let the grit of the paper do the work) - sand those flaws until they just disappear. Do not continue sanding on a spot that has no flaws left in it. Continue with the1000p grit paper until there are only a very few of the most stubborn flaws left - then you move up to 1500p grit paper. Use your 1500p paper to bring the piece to full dull. On those last flaws do your sanding one swipe at a time. You will see the flaw get smaller with every pass of the block/paper and the pass that gets rid of it completely should be the last pass you make with the paper.
Now if you want to after the 1500p has been done you can go back and very lightly sand the entire surface with 2000p grit, but its not really necessary on most jobs. I do it if there is a black or very dark color on the parts but if they are light colored I don't bother.
Now comes the buffing. If you don't have a machine, can't borrow one (not likely), then I don't know what to tell you. Sure, you could buff it by hand but I've never done that and wouldn't want to speculate about how you'd do it. I will say this though, I do not honestly think most guys could possibly do a good buffing job by hand, at least not anywhere near the quality you'll get with a buffer.
Buffing is just sanding - really. Its just sanding with even finer grits of material. Sand paper cuts, buffing compounds cut. Buffing pads also effect the rate at which material is removed. Wool buffing covers are very coarse and are only use with coarse buffing compounds for the initial buffing. Foam pads come in different degrees of 'hardness' and are graded from coarse to fine cutting capability. Generally speaking they are color coded.
My own preferences in buffing compounds are 3M's Perfect-It II for almost all of the work and then Meguires (sp?) Swirl Remover to finish the job. Perfect-It acts as a multi-grade compound so I use it first for an initial pass with a dedicated wool pad. This first pass just knocks the dull off the surface. With this done I rinse the piece completely with soapy and then clear water to remove any remaining compound. I then go to Perfect-It with my coarse foam pad (at the moment I'm using a new set of pads from "Custom Shop" on my Makita 9227c buffer. The set of pads is inexpensive (about $30 I believe) and they are holding up very nicel. The second buffing with the foam pad and the 3M compound will begin to bring a nice shine. Then I change to the medium pad and continue with the Perfect It, this give a shine that will blind you on a sunny day. Wash the part down again and then its time to finish. Using the finest finishing pad on the buffer I move on the the swirl remover. I put this stuff on the pad directly and I also apply it to the part by hand. Buff this last compound in and it will leave you a flawless surface.
And that's really about it. Usually I can cut and buff a tank, pair of side covers, a fender or two, and a helmet in about 4 hours. Most of the time is in the sanding, it doesn't actually take very long to buff bike parts. Oh, now for tips - always make sure you have some way to hold the parts safe while buffing. You can not possibly hold the part yourself and buff it at the same time. Buffers snag parts and throw them through the air for great distances, and they always land on rocks or other sharp things.
As far as buffing goes, once again, let the machine do the work. There is no reason to press down on the buffer (and lots of reasons not to). Never let the compound dry out, add more when needed. Do the work out of the sun if you are out doors. Make sure where ever you do the work that you are in a place where no contaminants can blow onto the surface while you are sanding or buffing.
And that's about all that comes to mind at the moment - but if you've got questions I'll be more than happy to answer.
On Edit: Go to this website and read - it will answer every single question you might have about cutting and buffing:
http://www.autobody101.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=7&sid=178dbbc593e197d76a5c3d3b80d8cad0
