How would you polish this section? First time burning an edge. Whoops…

[MountainBound]

Hello AG, been doing paint corrections for 10+ years and goofed today. Working on this 2018 Audi which had extremely hard paint. Was using my Rupes LHR15 Mark III and LHR75e to tackle the job. Variety of pads, 5" microfiber for the large sections and rupes blue wool for the small sections. This section is at the bottom of the front fender and was extremely swirled from the car seeing touch style car washes its whole life. Do I need to get a ibrid nano for areas like this? Tell me where I goofed.

[IID]

Hello AG, been doing paint corrections for 10+ years and goofed today. Working on this 2018 Audi which had extremely hard paint. Was using my Rupes LHR15 Mark III and LHR75e to tackle the job. Variety of pads, 5" microfiber for the large sections and rupes blue wool for the small sections. This section is at the bottom of the front fender and was extremely swirled from the car seeing touch style car washes its whole life. Do I need to get a ibrid nano for areas like this? Tell me where I goofed.

Any body line that has a raised surface as such...the clear coat most likely is thiner than the rest of the vehicles body surface area.
Best to use a non-forced orbital or just dont hit the raised area (pinched crease). You can also tape with some 1/4" width tape (or wider depending on the pinched crease area width).

[Kinalyx]

As said above, i probably would have taped that edge off, or at least used a less powerful machine and probably a 3" pad or smaller to make sure i could get around the body line without spending too much time on top of it

[opie]

Best to use a non-forced orbital or just dont hit the raised area (pinched crease)

Niether of the two machines he listed are forced rotation. So im going to guess that somewhere along the line it had to be user error. Would take forever to generate that much heat from a free spinning tool to burn through clear

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[2black1s]

I agree with the operator error assessment.

Even though random orbital polishers are fairly safe, there are still some basic precautions that should be taken.

I've seen many times (in videos and real life) polishers being run up to and across body lines and edges like they don't exist. While you can get away with that most of the time when using a random orbital polisher, if you continue to do it indiscriminately, it's going to bite you eventually. I think that is what happened in this case.

I also think that those of us who learned polishing with a rotary are less likely to be guilty of this bad habit... Doing such with a rotary would make burn-throughs like this a common occurrence.

[MountainBound]

As said above, i probably would have taped that edge off, or at least used a less powerful machine and probably a 3" pad or smaller to make sure i could get around the body line without spending too much time on top of it

Would you of used a 1/4" tape like mentioned above?

Niether of the two machines he listed are forced rotation. So im going to guess that somewhere along the line it had to be user error. Would take forever to generate that much heat from a free spinning tool to burn through clear

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Correct, no forced rotation. I agree this was my fault and operator error but was completely shocked when it happened as I use very short polishing cycles. I'm thinking the microfiber and wool pads I was using created too much heat along with the paint being extremely thin on that edge.

I agree with the operator error assessment.

Even though random orbital polishers are fairly safe, there are still some basic precautions that should be taken.

I've seen many times (in videos and real life) polishers being run up to and across body lines and edges like they don't exist. While you can get away with that most of the time when using a random orbital polisher, if you continue to do it indiscriminately, it's going to bite you eventually. I think that is what happened in this case.

I also think that those of us who learned polishing with a rotary are less likely to be guilty of this bad habit... Doing such with a rotary would make burn-throughs like this a common occurrence.

Since this section is mostly edges, would you of just ran a small tape line on all of them and just hit what you could?

[2black1s]

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Since this section is mostly edges, would you of just ran a small tape line on all of them and just hit what you could?

Unless you have a mini polisher, e.g., 1, 2, 3-inch, I'd just do areas like that by hand. I've never been one to tape off edges unless there's no other way.