Was sent the below via e-mail. I tend to prefer to answer question on this forum where thousands of eyeballs can see the answers and discuss versus one set of eyeballs and there's very little discussion.


Here's what I was sent,


Mike,

Would Calcined Kaolin Clay be considered DAT or SMAT?

And in general are products that use Calcined kaolin clay abrasives i.e. Mothers Pure Polish, etc, less abrasive on paint?

Regards,
I'm not a chemist and don't play one in the forum world but my guess is Calcined Kaolin Clay would be a DAT or Diminishing Abrasive Technology type abrasive.



When I worked for Meguiar's people were always asking,

What's in the bottle?

John Dillon, one of my Managers at Meguiar's helped to form the answer for that question, goes like this,


"Mike, when people ask you about the ingredients simply focus their attention to the performance of the product not what's inside the bottle"




That's good advice. It was back when John shared it with me and it's still just as good today.


Let's take a look at the BIG PICTURE

The fact that you're reaching out to me and asking about product used to polish paint, in most cases if you simply stick with a brand that has a good and even great reputation you can trust they did their research when they hired their chemists and that their chemists know what they are doing when they create a formula.


Because you referenced Mothers Pure Polish, I'll take a guess you mean this one,

Mothers California Gold Pure Polish


And from the description, (I made key points bold)


You washed it; so it’s clean right? Well, probably not completely – and a perfectly clean, smooth surface is vital when you are trying to achieve a mirror shine. You’ve gotta lay the groundwork to achieve perfection. California Gold Pure Polish is the first step. It prepares your paint for sealer, glaze, and ultimately - wax.

Mothers™ developed this mild polishing agent as the foundation of what’s been called The Ultimate Wax System.

The three phase process of cleaning, polishing, and protecting your car’s valuable finish.

California Gold Pure Polish reaches into the depth of the paint, removing oxidized paint, old wax build-up, and trace amounts of particulate.

Such debris, if allowed to remain on the paint surface, can be ground into the finish during the waxing process causing swirl marks and even tiny scratches. Such neglect negatively impacts the life of the paint and diminishes the beauty of the finish. California Gold Pure Polish cleans the surface and gently polishes over the edges of larger imperfections, making them less noticeable, uncovering the 3-dimentional shine in the paint.

It really sounds like a light or even non-abrasive paint cleaner to me. A paint cleaner is for doing light cleaning to clean the surface of like the copy mentions, light defects like surface oxidization, old wax build-up and trace amounts of particulates or the term I would use would be surface impurities.

It's not really a compound or a polish in the true sense of the words "compound & polish", which are normally abrasive products intended to remove paint and thus level the surface of which the effect will be to visually and physically remove below surface paint defects like real swirls and scratches.


In my way of thinking, if I have a car that needs a "paint cleaner", instead of using a paint cleaner I will go ahead and use a light or fine cut polish as a fine cut polish will do everything a paint cleaner will do PLUS it will remove light or shallow swirls and scratches.

Mothers also makes a fine cut polish here,

Mothers Professional Finishing Polish 12 oz.


From experience, best results when working on clearcoat paints as far as actually removing swirls and scratches comes from machine application of products like the Mothers Professional Finishing Polish using a foam pad and an orbital polishers.



The above took me about 20+ minutes to "think-out" and also "type-out" and that's part of Autogeek's customer service but for this kind of typing time it's really better invested and leveraged on our forum, not in an e-mail.

Hope the above helps and if you choose to pursue this topic further I would strongly encourage you to JOIN our forum and interact with me here versus e-mails.


https://www.autogeekonline.net/forum/register.php