Glass Polishing-techniques and products

[JohnnyAb]

Some background- my previous vehicle, a 1995 Plymouth Neon, had a lot of wiper haze scratches in the windshield. I bought a glass polishing kit from The Eastwood Company to remove them. I polished the windshield and it came out really well. The only thing I didn't like was how taxing it was to try to polish with a drill. I was constantly fighting the drill trying to kick out of my hands. I did two windshields with the glass kit's 2.5 inch pad and drill adapter. The windshields came out great, but my arms and hands were almost crippled afterwards.

My current vehicle is a 2007 Civic Si which also suffered from wiper haze scratches in the windshield. I wanted to polish out the scratches to decrease the glare on my windshield before winter gets here. I recently purchased a Harbor Freight 6" dual action polisher after reading some good things about it on this site. I also saw that Griots makes their own glass polish and polish pads. After reading that their polish only really removes water spots, I figured I could use their glass polishing pads on my DA and use the glass polishing compound (I think its called rhodite) from the Eastwood kit. Last weekend I used this set up to polish the windshield on my Civic. The hazing was nothing extreme, but I think I got better results from the set up with the drill, even though using the DA was easier on my arms and hands.

I've read on here already that most people say a DA does not have enough power (no direct rotary action like a rotary polisher, or forced rotation like a Flex) to polish glass. I think the results that I got from my set up got me satisfactory results. I didn't induce any additional scratches, and I removed most of the wiper haze, but I think that I can still make it better. There are still very light scratches from the wipers. To clarify my set up, a Harbor Freight 6" dual action polisher using the backing plate that comes with the polisher, a Griot's Garage glass polishing pad prepped by soaking in water. The polish was added to the pad by tapping a small amount out of the container and wetting it with a spray bottle until it turned into a wet slurry. The slurry was soaked up into the pad by pressing the pad into the slurry. Just guessing here, I used about 12 to 15 lbs of pressure on a speed of 4.5. I did an area of about 18"x18" at a time, moved the buffer slowly, did two passes in a cross-hatch pattern, stopped to wet the pad without adding polish, and did two more passes. It worked well and kept the glass fairly cool, but was kind of slower than using the drill, and didn't yield results as good.

Since I've been looking here on AutoGeek, I found CeriGlass. Would CeriGlass be better to use with this set up? Is the cutting ability of CeriGlass more than the rhodite in the Eastwood kit? Would increasing the speed of the polisher help? Would going to a 3" backing plate and pad help to put more pressure on a smaller area instead of spreading out the force to a large area?

I'd like to go at this windshield one more time to get the rest of the wiper scratches out, but I'd like to try to do it more time efficiently.

[Joengo]

Hope this helps:

REMOVAL of Glass Scratches with CarPro and a Griots DA

[vanev]

OP.

Did you prep the glass?
- Wash and clean.
- Razor blade.
- Clay Bar.
- Rinse.

[Calendyr]

Using both a Glass Specific pad and Ceriglass is the way to go for sure. I do not know how it compares to Eastwood's product.

[swanicyouth]

I'd recommend the CarPro glass pads and Ceriglass. I have zero experience with Griots pads, but I can tell you the Lake Country pads are just not good. They've jacked up more glass than they've fixed - including mine.

You will not be able to remove deep scratches - simply because it will be next to impossible to level the glass material surrounding then scratch level with the bottom of the scratch.


But most scratches you can remove. Quite frankly, unless you are very experienced - I'd be a little leery of using a rotary on glass with a cerium oxide polish, as the possibility exists you could optically distort the glass.

You want to run the DA wide open, use a lot of pressure, and keep the slurry wet. Heat usually isn't a factor - simply because you will be spraying so much water to keep the polish wet, it's acts to keep the pads cool. This is how you are able to run the machine wide open with a lot of pressure without cooking the pads or BP.

[JohnnyAb]

Joengo - thank you, that helps a lot! Lots of good info in there.

Vanev - Yes. No. Yes-ish. Yehhh...no. I will admit that I did fail to prep the glass properly. I had clayed the glass about 2 weeks before the polishing. I did clean the glass 3 times before polishing, but I did not run a razor blade over it. I was watching one of AMMO Larry's videos about glass cleaning and had a glass pane shattering, light bulb kind of moment when he started razor blading the glass. I had never even thought of it, even though I own 4 different scrapers and scrape state inspection stickers off of windshields every day at work. So, I guess you could say, all I really did to prep the glass was clean the windshield.

Calandyr and swanicyouth - It sounds like I need to get some CeriGlass.

Looking at the link that Joengo posted (Edit- I just realized that the thread that Joengo posted is yours, swanicyouth!), it looks to me like the Griots pads are the same or extremely similar to the LC pads. Black velcro, thin, kind of loosely packed rayon fibers. It sounds like the CarPro pads are more like the pad from the Eastwood kit. It is a very firm piece of rayon, the fibers being very hard packed, you cannot bend it, even when its wet. Thankfully, I didn't induce problems into the windshield by using them, I just didn't get great results. I'll have to pick up a 5" and 3" backing plate, some CarPro pads, and some CeriGlass and try again. I'll save the GG glass pads for when I get some Pinnacle GlassWork to clean up and polish the other windows that don't need aggressive scratch removal.

Full polisher speed, lots of pressure, keep the polish wet. Got it. Thanks for the links and all the advice guys! If I can, tomorrow, I will get some pictures of the glass so far and show you the results I got with my first round of polishing.

[Setec Astronomy]

I'm still interested in trying the sanding approach.

[Paul A.]

I used this on my daughters hacked up windshield last weekend:

CarPro FlyBy30 Windshield & Glass Coating Kit

Phenomenal results! I used my rotary and a purple foamed wool pad and it looks like invisible glass now and with the FlyBy30 coating as a repellant. The Car Pro CeriGlass product needs to be worked wet and throws a bunch of sling...cover EVERYTHING you don't want to clean after. It's a looonnnggg work time to get it perfect but well worth it.

Wipe down and clean the wiper blades well when your done.