Polishing Your Car’s Paint To Perfection
 

In a perfect world, you wouldn’t need to polish your car’s paint.  Cleaning and waxing is all that’s really necessary to protect and beautify your car’s finish.  Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world.  Your car’s paint is bombarded by contaminants and assaulted by foreign objects every day.

Some automotive appearance experts suggest that it’s possible to maintain a car’s paint without polishing at all.  I’m not as optimistic.  I recommend polishing when it’s necessary to solve a specific problem or to achieve a desired result.  I will discuss advanced uses of polish in later chapters.  For now, you can think of polish as a tool for pre-wax cleaning and improving paint gloss.  A fine polish gently removes surface contamination and improves surface reflectivity.

UNDERSTANDING CAR POLISH

Before we can talk about polishing, we need to establish a common understanding of what polish is.  The word polish is highly misused throughout the car care and appearance industry.

For our purposes, a paint polish is an abrasive lotion or cream used to remove small amounts of the paint’s surface.  The cutting ability of the polish will determine the amount of paint removed with each hand stroke or each revolution of a buffer, as well as the resulting finish.  A fine polish will create a bright, glassy finish, whereas a coarse polish may cloud the paint’s surface.

Reasons to Polish Your Car’s Paint

Many people believe that cars come off the assembly line with perfect paint.  That’s far from the case.  There are many conditions that cause minor paint flaws requiring additional finishing work.  Dust nibs (small particles that land in the paint while it is still wet) are a good example.  Most car manufacturers take care of these problems at the factory using abrasive finishing materials.  Sometimes it is the car dealer who recognizes the flaw and fixes it.

Repairing minor paint flaws through polishing is not harmful to the paint system unless you remove too much paint.  If more than 50% of the clearcoat finish is removed, you stand a good chance of premature paint system failure.  If more than 75% of the clearcoat finish is removed, you will experience immediate paint system failure.  It can be a very fine dance between success and failure.

Here’s a general rule to follow.  If a scratch or other flaw can be felt with your fingernail, it’s too deep to be completely removed through polishing.  That’s not to say that polishing won’t help hide the flaw; it will.  Take a look at the following 3M diagram showing paint layers and minor scratches (marring) in the clearcoat surface.  These scratches can be removed completely through polishing, because more than 50% of the clearcoat would remain.  

 

If scratches run deep into the clear coat, as illustrated in our next 3M diagram, polishing cannot fix the problem.  However, polishing a deep scratch will hide or lessen the appearance of the problem.

 

Non-clearcoat finishes have the same basic rules.  You should not remove more than 50% of the top coat (color coat) finish when repairing a scratch or other paint flaws.

It is important to understand how a polish can be used to “hide”  scratches and other micro marring.

 

Use A Fine Polish To Refine The Finish

If your car did not require compounding to remove surface imperfections, that’s great.  You’re way ahead of the game.  Let’s get started on learning hand polishing techniques.

The purpose of polishing is not to fix paint imperfections.  That’s what we used the fine compound for in the previous step.  Polishing is used to refine the paint surface and to begin the process of glazing.  When a paint is fully glazed, it has taken on all of the natural gloss and reflection it can without assistance from a wax or sealant.

Just as with compounding, you need to adjust your thinking with polishing.  Many people and product manufacturers suggest using a terry cloth towel or terry cloth applicator to apply polish.  This is no longer the best polishing tool.

Today, the best tool for polishing is a high-quality foam applicator.  Likewise, for buffing off polish residue, do not use terry cloth or flat cotton toweling.  A good microfiber polishing cloth is far superior and is many times less abrasive than cotton terry cloth toweling.

The procedure for polishing is not much different than it is for compounding.  The idea is to keep the polishing applicator as flat to the paint surface as possible.

 

Polishing paint is a acquired skill.  It can take years to master.  If you’re planning to use a machine, my best advice is to practice on older cars.  Most importantly, select the correct polish for the job.  Use the chart at the beginning of the chapter to help determine which polish grade you should be using.  Once you’ve selected the right polish, make sure you use the right tools.