How to polish paint (for beginners!): choosing your pad for the shiniest paint

Ian all the time people ask us how do I know which pad to choose when I'm

polish

ing

paint

I'm Ivan I'm Nick this is DIY details today we're going to go a little deeper with this hood how to choose

your

pad what's the difference between a wet pad and a dry one and what is a test point? I want to start here, what is

paint

polish

ing? Because if you don't know how to choose

your

pad, I guess there are a lot of things you probably don't know. I'm not sure and the first thing we need to do is make sure we have a clean, decontaminated surface to start with, and being a junkyard, the hood isn't exactly clean.

I think you would be surprised, maybe not by you, but by the general details. public that people often just apply dry towels over the paint and don't realize how much risk can be risked when not pre-treating a panel when it is not safely washed let alone polished as precisely during the process. It's about every step, we don't want to inflict damage, we're trying to reduce the risk of damaging it, so the first thing we need to do is make sure we get everything out of it, we're going to let this sit for a few minutes, let everything clean do his work.

Now you will notice that we have a lot of completely clean foam. Yes, we add just a touch of amazing foam which gives it more time to stay there and it's fun to watch the amazing foam froth. We just add about half an ounce into our ik foer, just enough to add a little more dwell time while it's actually dwelling right now. What should people know about what's happening here in the painting before they do it? Wash, so where the suds actually lodge is where we have a higher concentration of dirt because it stays there and doesn't slide down.

If it was ceramic coated it would have slid off the hood or if it was waxed even for that matter, so now We've let it sit for two or three minutes, we'll rinse it off now. It's clean, not even close, but the sand that was on it we've removed and, uh, all clean, breaks down any oil or grease that may be on it. next we need to do a contact wash to do this we will use no rinse rinses 256 to 1 trick wash which is 1 oz of our Rims wash in 2 gallons of water a really easy way to wash your car incredibly safe how to wash the car. you want to wash the car well, we could have said we'd start with clean polish paint, we're just doing a quick wash demo, so that's one side of this hood that I just went ahead and washed, but even that adds a little more risk than I would like exactly, so what we want to do is pre-spray some rinse on the surface, let it sit for a few seconds, and now that the rinse is emulsifying the dirt, it's breaking it down. and it's making it even safer to wash, yeah, so talk about the difference between.

I mean, this is a test hood so you can do what you want properly, but talk about the difference between what I just did versus pre-treating it with Rinel once again. So, an extra layer of lubrication, slipperiness and cleaning power was added. What's the difference here? As you look at this paint, the difference is that this side will actually get cleaner because now we have the Rinus pretreatment and the prework on this side. Now there was a risk of scratches on this hood, we actually want to scratch it so that's no problem, but if you're doing it the right way and we want to mitigate any potential damage that we can cause in the wash by using safe practices and one of those safe practices are to make sure to pre-spray the rinses now if you are using soap.

Excellent foam, rinse it off the foam again before contact washing. We don't even have a foam cannon in the garage of our new/old shop. right there really hasn't been any work done here so we're doing a back to basics series just using a hose so we've been pretreating the vehicles with everything clean then we hose them down and then we like to just do it and then without rinsing. the surface like Ivan did and then use no rinse in our wash bucket at this point, if I was just washing the car I could spray on some ceramic shine, there's the drying, a bada bing bada boom, I had a clean panel and protected, but we're just getting started.

We have to prepare for polishing properly, so the next step is decontamination. To do this, we have our synthetic decontamination towel perforated and normally we wouldn't even apply it to the paint like that, but again we tried the hood, we're trying to inflict some scratches here. even though we're teaching you how to wash safely and there are a lot of scratches on the hood to begin with, so what we're going to do next is iron remover, a spray of iron remover, here we go with a new spray once it's in the hood on the towel we marry the two together and that's our starting point so we have a lot more lubrication here and the iron remover is a great lubricant to start with you'll see foam in a few seconds well there's also perforations on this towel Ivan So what are we trying to remove from the paint and then where does it go?

Well, it goes to the surface of the towel and inside the towel and many people get confused by this and worry unnecessarily, almost like you know what I am. Removing the paint will scratch the paint. In reality, there is not much there. You have previously washed it. You do not have the sand. You do not have the dirt that is there. You have microscopic particles of contamination that are on the surface that we do not see with our eyes and we do not feel with our hands. hands are not as big they are not as scary now if we had taken this before washing it and this is what we are using to wash yes we are going to scratch the paint we do this very often but it reminds me when we have someone who has never used this Decon towel before you're surprised at how easy it is, how easy and efficient it is, yes, because it's just two sprays of iron remover instead of spraying the entire panel with our more expensive product, letting it say looking those purple streaks showing that the iron remover is working to convert the rust from these contaminants, well actually look at these SS we could keep working this for another 10 minutes and this is all you need, there is plenty of lubrication, we have surfactants in the iron remover that add that lubrication and foam, uh, and it's doing a great job of actually cleaning this paint for us before polishing, yeah. and I'm doing something on purpose here at a 45 degree angle because we know all the scratches were in a straight line.

I'm going to stay here for a few seconds and we'll check it later to see if there are any. 45 degree straight line messing up the surface because people always wonder if this will scratch my paint, mess up my paint properly and when done correctly with enough lubrication it won't, and you can see how much suds we build up and that's the iron remover that's doing . that and when you fold the towel in four, you're mitigating any pressure points, right? And you know it very well. I'm barely touching the towel. I think that should be enough, perfect now that we're starting to see some water. movement here yes, we have decontaminated this paint and it may be starting to show signs of having protection at some point right now.

I'm going to find a towel to dry off. I'll be right back because we're actually going to dry this out. A little corner to see if the decontamination towel caused any damage, so let me dry this little corner here and yes, we have scratches everywhere here, but we don't have any marks, we don't have any lines going in this direction, nothing, nothing. not at all and that's how it should be without pressure adequate lubrication it's a safe process now the next thing we want to do is continue with this decontamination routine and we're going to do it with the water stain remover and the water stain remover arrived.

This is what you know, an important part of decontamination is water spot remover and people think well there are no water spots on this hood, there could be mineral content and the minerals come from different things in the details or In real life, sorry, and that's if you're driving. On a salty road, minerals build up when you dry your car or let it air dry and a lot of people like to use the Master Blaster or use the leaf blowers and that's a fun way to dry your car, but you're actually letting it dry. . a thin film there and if you have minerals in the water, that will build up and start to create a mask on the surface.

Ian, are we making polishing too complicated? We haven't even gotten to the pads yet and now we say For them, you need to use an iron remover and a Decon towel and a water stain remover, which is probably a better term for a mineral solvent, right, yeah, but it seems like there are many steps before polishing, eh, it's too much for them, no. get great success with polishing it's all in the preparation so when you're cooking something if you have everything ready that recipe is a lot easier to make but if you're looking for things you'll be doing the same thing but the preparation is the base for the polishing work, yes, and I think why DIY makers can get less than ideal results, is because they probably aren't doing this preparation, so in fact, I would say this is really crucial. part right now I have a printed towel to rinse.

I'm just going to shake the water splash remover so this can have been moistened in the same waterless wash bucket that we had our Legacy sponge in before exactly, yeah, and by shaking we're working on You'll notice I'm not flipping the towel No I'm trying to pick up the water SWOT Rover I'm just trying to shake I'll let you get to that bottom corner there often in the details, you'll often flip the sides, because you We're not trying to get dirt or anything that could scratch the paint. We've already thoroughly washed and decontaminated it, so like you said, there's no pressure on the towel and you're working on this exact same side, yes, the entire vehicle. trying to build redundancy into your water stain remover by hitting each part of the paint with a little bit of agitation and then you'll get enough dwell time uh just doing this will work fine yeah and some people mistakenly think that water The stain remover has some type of protection because once you have done the stain remover with water, you are very likely to get hit like that and if people don't see the beating or they don't know what you are referring to what the water is like.

The behavior looked good at the beginning, when we had water here, it was just a layer of water that stayed there now the water goes away and that water going away tells us that the surface is clean now, yes. You may think your ceramic coating or wax is dead. Hey, it only lasted a few weeks but this brand said it would last that long or maybe it's our products. This decontamination process restores the water. We just received this hood from the junkyard. I did not do it. I have some idea about its history but there had to be some protection here Ivan, well actually paint from a paint booth is the most hydrophobic paint you will ever see more than most coatings so a clean paint and a clean surface will do this and if you go to a junkyard or if your car doesn't churn water at all and then you follow the steps we've done now, there's a good chance you'll actually reset some beads and there's no protection there , but when we say water beads, these are water beads, all these little water droplets, water droplets and you know, a lot of people ask, oh, I prefer sheets to beads.

Well, what does sheets mean? This is beads, so look at all these little water beads and why would anyone? They want water droplets on their paint. The water droplets lift the dirt off the surface and if we were driving on the road, it would almost self-clean the vehicle because it lifts it off the surface and then it's in that suspended bead, the bead goes away as we see. here it just falls off the panel now the sheets are when you have a larger amount of water like this it just disappears into a big sheet and we basically have a dry surface so the sheets are beating and a lot of people confuse that oh I want .

To produce the leaves, I don't want to produce the beads, they are the same product, just the amount of water you put on the surface will determine if it is pounding or sheeting. I think it's fascinating because this painting is really torn apart. I mean, you see scratches everywhere, you could have totally scratched the paint and then protected it at the end and had all these water bees exactly, but the reason we eliminate a lot of these imperfections by leveling the clear coat a little bit when we polish is to so that your eye perceives all these little scratches and indentations correctly, it's refracting the light and unevenly and it looks a little cloudy, you'll get more brightness when that looks more uniform to your eye and then you add the protection and that goes. to add yetresults we got in two steps, and they are two very simple steps, and we did it.

We didn't spend much time, we just did an up and down pass, that's it, when you're buffing you're going to do a left to right pass and then another set of up to down passes, up, down, left, right , left, right, right. We're going to work on that section 2 by two, so we usually teach three section passes, so up down left right Up Down clean your pad, move on to the next polishing section, yeah, so you'll spend more time painting and you'll get more removing defects with that wool when we're actually going to finish this off by doing a regular section pass so left right up down left right show you how it's done with the wool, yeah, yeah, so we're going to do it like a Polishing in two stages now, if we're trying to remove these, these scratches, are you putting a lot of pressure and heat on the paint to actually get them?

The less pressure you have, the better it will cut, the better the job will be. the easier it is for you, the easier it is for the machine and for the polisher because when you create heat, this is plastic CLE Cod is plastic, it is not lacquer like in the 70s, this is plastic and that plastic when you heat the plastic becomes soft. When it becomes soft it becomes malleable and the abrasives instead of cutting are now sticky and rolling and have no fun. You know, what I would never do and what I'm enjoying now is just resting my hand on the paint.

Do you ever detail it for someone and then they admire your work and then lean on the painting. This is usually not what you ever do, it's a testing ground. Hood, this is how I would normally do a test point and a test point normally. I'll start with the yellow pad, left, right, up, down, left, right, wipe it down and decide if I need to be more aggressive. No? With a little experience, we know we need to be a little more aggressive with this and I've already done the test point, but if you're doing a two stage test point, this is how I do it, so start with a pad of wool with a 50% overlap so I move down about 3 each time and then I'm going to go up and down again moving about 3 inches each time and you can see how much pressure I'm putting on the machine none yeah and then I'll finish left to right.

One thing people may not know how to measure, but once you hear it this way, it makes sense. this is as wide as your shoulders that's as wide as you go You're not reaching here and your section passes you're staying within the range of your shoulders correct and there's actually a very simple way to use your microfiber towel now if you have a blanket Large drying towel may not be the best choice, but your standard size 16X6 microfiber towel is a good size. The next stage two people might wonder what is going on, we only have one liquid in our system, it is the gold standard polish and you can leave it on the surface when you are doing two steps exactly, you don't have to clean it no, actually we prefer that you leave it on the surface, it actually does a better job a spray on a moving pad a spray and a moving the pad and spraying like you're angry and I'm going to do the exact same motion, speed three, no pressure on the machine.

Flat pad to the right and you'll notice there's a little area that I left, oh, I noticed that and that's to show that. there are other tools on the market now we have our rotary we have our day if you have never polished paint before and you don't want to invest 2 3 four five six some cost up to $1,000 now in a polisher there is a simple polisher that you can buy it or maybe you already have it, ago great job, let's see it fly from the outside, there we go and this is just a simple random orbital or dual action sander.

We cleaned the pad with a spray of polish. Let's do that. little bottom section here, but you can use the wool pad, the yellow waffle or the motor jewelry pad, the red one and people can use this at the highest speed, it turns on, yes, exactly because of the short stroke, so wet no rinse and no I'm not in a rush to dry it, let the air do the work for you a little bit, so I tend to polish the whole car before I clean it and then when I go out there and clean it, it's very easy.

I can do two panels, go back to the first wipe or wet the third, dry the second and continue like this, there we have it, so as a proof point I see that we have eliminated many defects, there are still defects in the paint and At this point, It's up to you to decide if you want to fix those flaws, if you want to spend time removing them, and obviously these flaws were a little deeper than normal. People do not use a stiff nylon brush that is used for cleaning. rims to wash off the paint, but it's a good example of the way we teach paint correction or paint polishing, we don't teach going all the way to 100% because after being a hero, you become zero very quickly. the clear coat is very thin, we teach preservation over perfection, if you're looking for that last 15, maybe even 10% look, I'm probably going to hit this with sandpaper as there probably isn't enough clear coat to do that, so I'm going to polish it, you're just removing a lot more clear coat when you go for the deep stuff and you're introducing a lot more risk, so we're teaching you how to do this safely without heating the paint with great results it's going to be perfect no and I don't think that there is nothing close to the perfect painting anyway exactly so if you have any questions leave them below the comments if you haven't subscribed yet now would be a good time because there is another video that will present this bell comparing the da with the rotary and that video, depending on when everything comes out, is right here.