Just to note, even though swirls can be removed by hand and the paint polished and waxed to a high gloss and it will look a zillion times better than when you started, it's still never going to look as good as the results you can achieve using a dual action polisher.
As
Bill Murry said in the move
Stripes,
"That's the facts Jack"
Let’s begin…
I'm going to rub-out the driver's side of the hood by hand and before starting, I’ve
sliced up half of the hood by taking some painter's tape and taping off small sections to show you how to
break-up a panel to be worked by hand when applying an aggressive product to remove swirls and scratches.
As you can see, you can’t tackle half a hood at one time, you have to work
small sections at a time.
For reference, I also placed a Meguiar's Supreme Shine Microfiber polishing cloth folded in half to give you and idea as to the size of the major sections to be worked. Meguiar’s Supreme Shine Microfibers are 16" by 24" inches so the folded cloth you see on the hood is 16" by 12".
This is about as big a section you want to work at one time. You can tackle a 16” by 16” section or any size around these dimensions but you really don’t want to work a section any larger than this. The reason why is because you won’t be able to focus enough energy to do a thorough job of evenly removing the swirls. As a result the paint will still be all swirled out when you’re finished.
Now on this Lincoln, the hood has a raised thin panel down the middle with two hard body lines to be careful around. The sides of the hood also have thinner panels separated from the major section between the middle of the hood with a hard body line running most of the length of the hood..
As you can see the thinner panels are broken up into two thin sections. The thin panel of paint on the side is too long to work all at one time so I broke it into two sections.
Then there's a section in front of the driver's side A-Pillar that need to be it's own section as it’s joined to the major section in front of the windshield. (If that all makes sense)
Every hood, door, roof, trunk lid etc, is going to be different, so you have to do your best to figure out how to
slice-up each panel. The important thing to understand is anytime you're removing swirls out of a modern clear coat you must only work a small section at a time. You cannot physically rub-out a huge section by hand
and do a great job.
This is how I would slice-up the hood of this Lincoln
Now that I've shown you how I sliced-up this particular hood, it's time to remove the Supreme Shine Microfiber and the tape. Remember, I only placed the tape on the car as a visual tool to help show
you how approach the defect removal step by hand.
Note: You actually slice-up each panel of a car in a similar fashion whether you're working by hand or with a dual action polisher for the same reasons. And the reason for this is because modern clear coats tend to be harder than old fashioned single stage paints like the paint that would have came on a 1965 Mustang.
Even if you’re using one of the popular dual action polishers like the Porter Cable polishers, the Meguiar’s polishers, and/or the Griot’s Garage polisher, because these tools have a clutch which stops the pad from rotating if you apply to much pressure, you can only work a small section at a time when doing any kind of defect removal step.
Here's a safety tip that's a best practice to develop anytime you're using Painter's tape on automotive paints. When you remove the tape, pull it back at and angle, not straight up, off the paint.
First we're going to use Meguiar's Ultimate Compound for our
first step process with both the orange and the white
CCS Euro Foam Hand Polish Applicators. That's right, we're going to rub-out the paint using two different levels of aggressiveness in our foam applicators because we want the driver's side of the hood to look as good as the machine buffed side.
We'll start with the aggressive orange pad and put quite a bit of
passion behind the pad and then follow this with the white foam applicator pad and
lessen our pressure. After the compounding step we’ll do the polishing step, so this half of the hood is going to get 6 cleaning steps before applying the wax.
With a new, dry pad it's important to add an
ample amount of product to start with, as your pad becomes wet with product you can cut down a little on the amount of product you apply. Because you're going to be applying firm pressure with a quick hand movement, you need enough product to provide good
lubrication.
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Originally Posted by Mike Phillips
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