A Detailer's Secrets On Paint Polishing

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paint

correction video,

paint

polishing

, scratch and swirl removal, it can be very intimidating if you have never corrected paint before, but in today's video I will try to make it as easy as possible. I'll give you a crash course and paint. Correction with so many different variables when it comes to paint correction. I can see why people feel intimidated when it comes to this process.

You have different machines. You have different types of paint to work with. You have different products. Pads, arm speeds, pressures and then machine speeds. I'm going to try to explain everything to you in order so it makes sense so you can start correcting the paint yourself. Let's start with different machines. There are now a variety of different machines. You have rotary polishers. You have forced rotation. polishers, you have short throw and long throw polishers, and then you have different sides for all of these polishers. The first type of polisher I want to tell you about is this high-speed rotary polisher.

This is what I started using. I do not use. We no longer use it with the innovations of other polishers in the detailing industry, but this is a staple. I mean, we haven't used it in the shop for a long time. I'll tell you, but there are times in certain situations where this will be useful this is a difficult machine to master this is a rotary

polishing

machine means it just spins in one direction it doesn't oscillate at all unlike some of these larger machines the rupes machine here this is a d a or a dual action polisher That means it's going to spin but it also rotates so it gives you two different actions.

What it does is help disperse heat, so heat is a byproduct when you're polishing. You will be hot. You're going to warm up. Turning up the heat of the panel is fine, but too much heat can damage the next machine is a forced rotation machine, it is very similar to a double action polisher, but with a double action polisher, the shaft will stop rotating under pressure, while Since a forced rotation will continue to spin no matter how much pressure is applied to it, it also has different backing plates for each machine. Here you have five inch backing plates, you have three inch backing plates, you have machines made for three inch polishers, you have a two inch and a one inch polisher here for different sections of the car in our shop we used to have machines with five and six inch backing plates which meant we had to carry five and six inch pads to reduce cost and confusion now just carry machines with a 5 inch backing plate, not much difference when it comes of using a 5 inch machine versus a 6 inch machine, if anything I feel like I have a little more control with a 5 inch machine.

It is a port-a-cable machine. I actually started my career with this porter cable machine. They are cheap here, they weigh like 129. This is a great machine to start with. It doesn't have as big a draw as the rupees machines, but if you're on a budget, this is a great machine to start with. You will be able to do the same with both machines, but this is something like a cadillac machine, in fact I have a port loading buffer at home that costs like 49 50 dollars and they are all going to do the same thing, but after years of polishing and spend hours and hours polishing, you want a machine that is not going to vibrate and that is what these rupa machines are known for: they have very little vibration, they are very comfortable to use for hours at a time, where these machines and the cheaper machines after a couple of hours if you are using them, you will feel in your hands that vibration that comes to you and you will be able to feel it in your joints and if you have done it for years and years like me, you will really feel it, so you will appreciate these machines when you use them in painting for hours and hours at a time, another variable you will have to work with is the type of pads and products you are using and there are tons of them on the market that you can It can be very confusing for a beginner to know what products, what pads and what combination use them.

I'm going to make it very simple again for you. I only have three pads in the store and we have other pads available, but for 95 of the jobs we're doing here, I can do any type of job I need with those three pads. Those three pads that I'm going to show you now. One of them is a microfiber pad. This is a cutting pad. When you are polishing paint you have a couple different steps, you may have a cutting step which is to remove major defects. We will remove the larger scratches and swirls first and then do a second step to refine the paint.

After using a heavy cutting pad like this with a heavy cutting compound, there will usually be micro haze or swirls left from that cutting stage, these microfiber cutting pads are somewhat new to the industry, they are relatively around five or six ago years these came out and they changed the way a lot of people polish paint because they cut very, very well, they cut fast and they finish very well to where people used to use three steps, four steps and now you can more or less cut it in two steps, you will have one cutting step and one polishing step, so this is our main cutting pad that we use here, the Lake Country Microfiber Pad, another pad that you'll see out there.

They are wool pads and I want to tell you about them, but make it as simple as possible. Wool pads usually for rotary polishers and you'll usually use them after you've wet sanded something, so if you have a job, especially in the body shop industry. if they just painted something, they wet sand all the orange peel, they'll use a foam pad and a foam pad and a rotary buffer cuts through the paint very, very quickly and you can do it when you've just painted the car. Because you have a lot of clear coat, when you have a factory clear coat, which is much thinner than a refinish, you don't want to cut through the paint as quickly, so this has become pretty obsolete in the detailing industry.

Foam pads, you have different ones. types of foam pads you have and they come in all different colors and the colors usually represent how thick or thin the foam pad is, so you have an orange or a yellow, the orange and yellow are usually cut more heavy so if you're working on a different paint system depending on whether the paint is hard or soft and we'll talk more about that as we go along here so if you can you can cut with these you can use a compound and you can cut paint with these they remove small layers if you're working with a soft paint, if you're working with a harder paint or a medium hard paint, you probably want to use a heavier cutting pad with the microfiber, but these foam pads, these pads thicker foams can cut and then you have smoother pads when you get to the black, white and blue these are usually finishing pads so use this with a buffer and this will refine the paint and remove all those micro swirls that you have by using a heavier pad and a heavier compound and this will finish the paint off and leave it nice and shiny and ready for your final protection step, whether that be wax, sealant or ceramic coating.

I have tried to make everything as simple as possible in my workshops and we usually only use three pads. I have other pads in the shop, but these are the three main pads that we use for cutting, finishing, polishing and waxing in one step, this is more of a maintenance, we will also use this if we have a very smooth paint, if we are working on a tesla or a porsche and it has very smooth paint we could switch to this one and we can actually cut with this one if we use a finer polish so depending on the job use one of these three pads and we'll see all the different variations of what you need to do and how you would choose these different pads and polishes depending on the paint system you are working on. onto the next variable, which is compounds and polishes, your different products, you have all kinds of different brands and you have all kinds of different types of compounds, you have heavy cutting compounds, fine cutting compounds, medium compound polishing, you have fine polishing , has jewel polishing. it has tapering abrasives and it has microabrasives, it can be confusing.

What it comes down to is you have two different types, you have a cut and you have a finish, just think about all you need is something to cut the paint and something to finish the paint we usually only use two steps here. I have used many of these products over the years and again I have tried to keep it as simple as possible when it comes to using these types of products, the latest product we have started. use is this oberk oh burke it has two steps it is step one and it is step two step one you are going to cut step two you are going to finish the painting simple easy you can find it in many systems, the mcguire system here have an ultra professional speed compound and then you will have an ultra professional finish polish again, it's just two steps 110 210 number one, cut the paint number two, finish the paint, so when it comes time to decide what products, what pads and what machines to use, you can If you combine any of these products, machines and pads in a couple of different variations, you have to think about what your expectations are or what your customers' expectations are and how much time you have because we can spend two hours on this doing very light polishing. and it will improve the shine a little bit, but it won't look perfect or we can spend several hours or several days making this look as perfect as possible and trying to remove every little scratch and swirl by the time we get to the paint correction, when we get there To put the machine in the car, we have to do a test and find out what is the best combination of all these variables to get the desired result that we are looking for or the expected result that we are looking for and We want to put all this together and find the fastest way Do this before putting the polish on the paint.

We want to make sure the car is as clean as possible. We have already washed this car. We used the clay bar and decontaminated it. the surface, the next step is to cover anything that we do not want polish residue left on any plastic or rubber edges. I am going to tape with this 3m yellow adhesive tape, this will keep your pad in tip top condition and This will prevent stains on the plastic or rubber. Trim me well. I hope I'm not jumping around too much for you, but there's a lot of information to cover. Now we're in the car and we have our machine hooked up and we have our pad ready to go so we're going to use the rupes lhr 15 mark 3 polisher here and on the back of the polisher you'll see the numbers one through six and this is another variable that You have to work with one will be the slowest speed and six will be the highest speed and you can see your rpm scale here, one is at 3000 rpm up to six where you are at 5200 rpm. rotations per minute, so I already told you that we will do two different stages, we will do a cutting stage and we will do a polishing stage.

Now, when you're working on paint, you have your metal. base sometimes you will have metal sometimes it will be plastic you have your then you have your substrate you have your primer you have your base coat which is your color coat your pigment and then you have your clear coat so we can only correct any defects that are in that top coat that It's the clear coat and generally if you rub your nail over a scratch and you find a deeper scratch and you rub your nail over it and if your nail catches the scratch it's through the clear coat and you're not going to be able to machine polish it because There is only a certain amount of clear coat on the vehicle.

If you polish too much, you will be left with a blemish or a burn mark known in the industry you have been through. the clear coat and now you can see pigment or primer or if you go too far you can probably see metal so our goal when we polish the paint is we want this paint to look as good but we want to remove the least amount of It's Of course we can because if we remove too much light again, it will endanger the paint system. This car that we are going to polish is a white vehicle and it is very difficult to see the swirls and scratches on it, but there are still scratches and swirls if, for example, we are working on this black car here, you can see the scratches and swirls a lot easier than you can hear, it will still be the same process if you are working on a target. car, if you're working on a dark colored car, it's just that you can't see them as much, they're not as predominant as on the light vehicle, but it's the exact same process, it's the same type of clear coat, so the speed it's just another variation that you have to deal with when you're machine polishing and normally on average we'll use a speed between four and five for the cut on this particular machine and then theYou figure out what polishing machines and pads to use and then you only gain experience when you hold that polisher in your hand for the first time, it's a strange experience. man it's really weird when most guys normally start they don't get to the edges so if I'm polishing this you're going to see them and they like right here and you're going to see spots that they miss because you're afraid to get this far when you're polishing paint.

Remember the section you are working on because you can miss big parts like here if you don't get there, that won't be corrected, so you have to polish that part. You can see it in the hoods, you know, making sure you have those overlapping passes. We're going to continue here and I'll probably do some voiceover and continue talking to you and explain exactly what I'm doing and what I'm thinking while I'm doing it. ah, before that, we need to clean the pad air compressor so that build up when you're polishing, you're going to have residue, it's clear coat residue and it's the actual product residue that builds up and surrounds these microfibers, you need to these microfibers become clear so they can do their job so they can remove more clear coat, so we'll actually turn this machine on and then we'll use this air chuck here and you saw all that dust rise into the air.

There are a couple of different things I'm going to do. Go take our dust collector, we have a dust collector, it's just a vacuum cleaner and it will absorb most of the dust that you don't want to breathe in this dust. I would recommend wearing a mask if you know I'm just doing this. a car, but if I was doing this every day, I would wear a mask because you don't want to breathe this stuff in here. Working clean is the key to getting good results when you are polishing. I'll clean my pad later. On each section pass, you'll also want to use several pads when performing a paint correction service.

What happens with the pads is that those fibers will start to build up with the product and the clear coat and after a couple of panels, you'll notice that you're not getting the same cut as when the pad was new, so you can clean the pad with a pad washer or you can simply change to a new pad and clean all the pads when you are done. Normally I will. Do about five or six pad changes on a vehicle this size. These B pillars are super soft and responsive. I'm going to fix the biggest flaws first and then come back with a foam pad and refine them further.

You will see some composite haze after this step and that is what you want to see. It is perfectly normal. What you're looking for is a constant haze. If you see straight line scratches through the haze, you will probably see them after your second stage of polishing, so if you want to remove those scratches you will need to continue with your compound and your cutting pad and if you are working on a car with scratches deeper, I encourage you not to pursue them at this time. This is where experience will come into play, not all scratches will be able to be removed from your vehicle's paint, you need to learn when to stop and be okay with the results and unfortunately most of the time this will just be a matter of instinct.

I feel like you can use a paint thickness gauge, but it's not a perfect tool. Most paint thickness gauges will only tell you how much paint you have from the metal to the top of the clear coat, but they don't tell you how thick the clear coat is. and every manufacturer will have a different thickness of clear coat, so when you have someone that says they want their car to be perfect, they want perfect paint, just remember that no car will have 100 perfect paint, there will always be some scratches. or a swirl that is just one part of the car, it's not worth the risk of causing paint damage or having premature clear coat failure.

I made another video about how many times you can actually polish the paint on a vehicle and you'd be surprised how many Sometimes you can polish the paint but there will come a point where you'll run out of clear coat and if you're working on an old car you really don't know. how many other

detailer

s have already polished that paint, so I use a thickness of paint. Gauge as a reference for how much paint I am actually removing from the vehicle. The correction process can be a long and daunting process. We've been at this for a couple of days and I think we're going to last like 12 hours. so if you have a friend to help you, it's always great.

I have my friend here, Juan. We'll delete the rest of this after finishing the composing session. I will clean the entire vehicle with an ipa solution and that's it. I go over and proofread all my work one last time before moving on to the final polishing stage. As I work I continually review the results after each section, if it's not to my liking I'll mark that area and then go back and polish it some more. This particular paint requires more passes than normal because it is a very hard paint. After you finished composing, you removed all the larger scratches.

Think about the first compositional step you are taking. large defects will be left with micro haze or micro deterioration and it is difficult to tell on this white car. You can see it a little bit if you look really close, you can really see it like on the black car we made. We showed you that you can actually see that micro haze, it stands out, so we're going to refine it with a Lake Country Black finishing pad and step number two, which is the supreme polish, you can use an air hose to blow away the compound dust.

Some guys like to wash the car at this point to get the surface really clean. I don't think it's necessary and to do that you would have to remove all the tape and then wait until the car dries completely. I again lowered my machine to 3 3.5 and polished and refined the paint. This step in this particular painting is much faster than the composition stage. I don't use as much pressure and it only takes a few passes to get the results. I'm looking if you are working on a car with let's say smooth delicate paint you might be looking at the exact opposite, the cutting session can be quick and easy and the polishing session can be time consuming, every car is a little . different after it's all said and done you want to go back and clean all the edges and all the crevices where polishing compound can build up.

Here I have a plastic razor blade tool that I use and go over every panel crease and edge emblem and Before you apply any protection options, you want to remove the polish. If you have polishing residue on the panel, it could compromise the effectiveness of the protection product you are using. You can see that the wheels of the car are scratched. They are just beat up, not well maintained. I wanted to compose and polish them to see if I can get them to look better. To my surprise, they turned out much better than I expected and unfortunately for me it only took another four. hours of my time to polish the wheels.

I'm super happy I did it. They turned out great. Make sure to come back to the next video where I cover them with ceramic. It was a big difference. Oh, she looks beautiful, so bright. Well there it is, we just finished the paint correction on the GTI. I think over three days we spent about 17 hours on the proofreading and polishing part of this and I hope you learned something, let me know in the comments. below, if you have any questions, please let me know. I'll be happy to answer it because I'm sure I've missed something in this video, but otherwise, polishing paint can be a very satisfying service for your vehicle.

It just takes a little time, I know it can be a little intimidating at first but now that you know the different machines, the techniques, some pads and polishers, now it's just about getting hands on experience in paint buffing, uh. and that's the best way to learn it, so I'm going to take it to the clean room and then we're going to apply a ceramic coating to it, so if you like the video, please like, subscribe and I'll see you next time. you