Why it's important to clean your pads often...

[Mike Phillips]

Why it's important to clean your pads often...

When you're buffing out a car it's important to clean your pads often. By cleaning your pad often you will work faster and you will enable your pad and product to work more effectively. Be sure to have both clean terry cloth towels on hand and also a nylon pad cleaning brush. It's also a good idea to have plenty of pads so as a pad becomes wet with product you can switch over to a clean dry pad. Dry pads work better than wet pads.


ANYTIME you're abrading the surface whether you're using an aggressive cutting compound of an ultra fine polish, you have two things building up on the face of your buffing pad...

• Spent product
• Removed paint

You need to remove both of these substances from the face of the pad and the panel you're working on before you apply fresh product. If you don't,

• You increase your chances of leaving micro-marring in the paint.
• Adding fresh product to spent product and removed paint adulterates the fresh product, it also dilutes it.
• Buffing with a dirty pad will be more difficult.
• The product will cake-up on the face of the pad.
• The product will become gummy on the paint and hard to wipe off.

How to clean your pads and other options to make buffing clean again...

• You can scrub the face of the pad with a nylon brush like a pad conditioning brush or even a nylon toothbrush
• If using a Dual Action Polisher or a Rotary Buffer you can clean your pad on the fly with a terry cloth towel
• You can wash your pads in a bucket of water.
• You can wash your pads in a sink under running water.
• You can wash your pads in a pad washer.
• You can switch to a clean, dry pad.
• You can switch to a brand new pad.
• You can used compressed air to blow off residue.

That's the whole idea behind cleaning your pad on the fly... you can remove a majority of the spent product and removed paint and then get back to running the buffer... buffing out an entire car already takes a l-o-n-g time... stopping to do some kind of pad cleaning procedure that isn't quick and easy keeps you from buffing on the paint.



Fast methods include,

• Pad Washers
• Cleaning your pad on the fly with a terry cloth towel
• Using a nylon pad conditioning brush
• Using a Spur if you're using a wool pad on a rotary buffer

Slow methods, (they might work well but they take you away from buffing on the car)

• You can wash your pads in a bucket of water
• You can wash your pads in a sink under running water

How to clean your pad with a nylon brush
Here's how to clean a pad with a nylon brush.

NOTE: you do this with the polisher turned OFF.







How to clean your pad on the fly using a terry cloth hand towel

Cleaning your pad on the fly is where you take a terry cloth towel, usually a medium size hand towel works best, you fold it in two and then simply hold the towel against the face of the pad and then turn the polisher on and use your hand that’s holding the towel to push the towel into the foam. This will act to draw any excess liquid out of the foam and any excess residue off of the face of the pad.


This is me using the Clean your Pad on the Fly Technique to clean my pad on the fly as I'm working around a car buffing it out.











This video explains the above technique in detail and shows you exactly how to use this technique to clean your pads.

How to clean your pad on the fly

[Kurt_s]

Hi Mike,

In keeping with your thread. How many orange correction pads do you normally use to correct a moderately swirled vehicle with a DA, provided you don't have a pad washer and use the on the fly cleaning method. How about white polishing pads afterward? I find that even using your on the fly method and a brush that a clean pad makes correction faster.

A pad washer seems like a nice option, but one can buy 10-20 pads for the price of the washer. Since I'm a hobbiest, I'm not likely to do more than one or two cars in a weekend, but I still think the washer is a cool tool.

Thanks

[BobbyG]

Hi Mike,

In keeping with your thread. How many orange correction pads do you normally use to correct a moderately swirled vehicle with a DA, provided you don't have a pad washer and use the on the fly cleaning method. How about white polishing pads afterward? I find that even using your on the fly method and a brush that a clean pad makes correction faster.

A pad washer seems like a nice option, but one can buy 10-20 pads for the price of the washer. Since I'm a hobbiest, I'm not likely to do more than one or two cars in a weekend, but I still think the washer is a cool tool.

Thanks

Having a good supply of pads on hand is always a good idea. I clean my pads on the fly using a "modified" system that I created.

For the most part everyone here knows what a grit guard is. I cut down an old bucket about an inch higher than the grit guard so I have access to it with the pad while it's on the polisher.

I pour some solution in the bottom of the bucket then add just enough water so that it's just covering the grit guard. Place the pad on the grit guard then turn the unit on allowing it to scrub the pad while the solution dissolves the contaminates.

The grit guard is plastic and does vibrate during use so I don't know how long it'll last but it's working so far...

To dry the pad I place the pad in another bucket and spin it up letting centrifugal force assist me in drying.

While this may not be as slick as the commercially available pad washer available through Autogeek, for the most part it does a decent job.

The bottom line is, there are lots of options for us to try!

[WRAPT C5Z06]

Hi Mike,

In keeping with your thread. How many orange correction pads do you normally use to correct a moderately swirled vehicle with a DA, provided you don't have a pad washer and use the on the fly cleaning method. How about white polishing pads afterward? I find that even using your on the fly method and a brush that a clean pad makes correction faster.

A pad washer seems like a nice option, but one can buy 10-20 pads for the price of the washer. Since I'm a hobbiest, I'm not likely to do more than one or two cars in a weekend, but I still think the washer is a cool tool.

Thanks

Hey Kurt,

I will eventually have enough pads to change after each panel. That would be awesome. However, I currently use about 6 orange pads per vehicle. 1 pad for every 2 panels. Same for white pads.

[Speakerguy45]

Having a good supply of pads on hand is always a good idea. I clean my pads on the fly using a "modified" system that I created.

For the most part everyone here knows what a grit guard is. I cut down an old bucket about an inch higher than the grit guard so I have access to it with the pad while it's on the polisher.

I pour some solution in the bottom of the bucket then add just enough water so that it's just covering the grit guard. Place the pad on the grit guard then turn the unit on allowing it to scrub the pad while the solution dissolves the contaminates.

The grit guard is plastic and does vibrate during use so I don't know how long it'll last but it's working so far...

To dry the pad I place the pad in another bucket and spin it up letting centrifugal force assist me in drying.

While this may not be as slick as the commercially available pad washer available through Autogeek, for the most part it does a decent job.

The bottom line is, there are lots of options for us to try!

That's a neat idea, i never thought of cutting the bucket to do that

[Kurt_s]

Having a good supply of pads on hand is always a good idea. I clean my pads on the fly using a "modified" system that I created.

For the most part everyone here knows what a grit guard is. I cut down an old bucket about an inch higher than the grit guard so I have access to it with the pad while it's on the polisher.

I pour some solution in the bottom of the bucket then add just enough water so that it's just covering the grit guard. Place the pad on the grit guard then turn the unit on allowing it to scrub the pad while the solution dissolves the contaminates.

The grit guard is plastic and does vibrate during use so I don't know how long it'll last but it's working so far...

To dry the pad I place the pad in another bucket and spin it up letting centrifugal force assist me in drying.

While this may not be as slick as the commercially available pad washer available through Autogeek, for the most part it does a decent job.

The bottom line is, there are lots of options for us to try!

Bobby,
Now that is an interesting alternative to the pad washer for the time being. What's your cleaning solution? I've been working with a few 6.5" orange and 2 4" orange flats for correction, and I find that I sometimes need to stop and clean the pads even using the on-the-fly method.

I've already learned the frisbee trick when trying to spin out a pad without a bucket.

Hey Kurt,

I will eventually have enough pads to change after each panel. That would be awesome. However, I currently use about 6 orange pads per vehicle. 1 pad for every 2 panels. Same for white pads.

Using clean pads certainly makes it go faster. Maybe I should have invested in more pads?

I decided to move down to 5.5" correcting pads anyway, so maybe I can get by with 3-4 orange and another grit guard if Bobby's method works. Perhaps the same for the whites.

I've also been thinking about moving away from CCS and into either flats or the Hydro-Techs since I'm going to use a smaller pad. What do you guys think of the flats, Hydro-tech or other?

The 6.5" CCS reds that I bought seem to be a waste of money. It just sucks up too much LSP so I use a 4" flat. Maybe a 5.5" would apply faster but the 4" doesn't take long and it is much easier to handle it by hand to get the tight spots.

Can I use the 6.5" reds for anything else other than LSP application? Maybe finish polishing, window buffing or with a paint cleaner?

Thanks for the suggestions!

[Wolf-Strong]

A method I have used with some success is to fill a bucket about 1/2 way with water/solution, and when it is time to clean the pad, hold the grit guard in one hand, while the other is holding the polisher running. You basically have to hold them sideways vs flat like in a normal pad washer, but if ran at a low enough rpm you won't get water flinging out if you just have the edges of the pad touching the water. Lift out for a brief second so it is now no longer in contact with water which helps dry it of, then let the grit guard fall to the bottom, turn the buffer face down, and spin it at speed to dry it off.

Works amazingly well and doesn't cost you a penny or another bucket, considering you already have a Grit Guard, which we all highly recommend to begin with.

[Mike Phillips]

For the most part everyone here knows what a grit guard is. I cut down an old bucket about an inch higher than the grit guard so I have access to it with the pad while it's on the polisher.

Very creative Bobby... that's thinking outside the bucket...


Both the Grit Guard Pad Washer and the System 2000 Pad washer both have pumps that inject cleaning solution at the face of the pad as you run the polisher and that's a benefit that will be hard to duplicate without the pumps or the entire system but if you're method is working to clean the pads then like I always tell my son...

Something is better than nothing...


How about a few pictures?

[Mike Phillips]

Hi Mike,

In keeping with your thread. How many orange correction pads do you normally use to correct a moderately swirled vehicle with a DA, provided you don't have a pad washer and use the on the fly cleaning method. How about white polishing pads afterward? I find that even using your on the fly method and a brush that a clean pad makes correction faster.

I can't remember the last time I actively counted pads... suffice to say... more pads are better than less pads...

In a perfect world being able to switch to a clean dry pad for each panel and a couple for the larger panels like the hood and roof, (depending upon what you're working on), is the fastest way to get through the correction steps, which take the most amount of time.

Somewhere on this forum I think I wrote something on the topic of how many pads you need to buff out a car... just not sure where...

But more is better...

The pads don't have to be brand new, just clean and dry, so that would be more clean and dry used pads or clean and dry new pads.

[Kurt_s]

I can't remember the last time I actively counted pads... suffice to say... more pads are better than less pads...

In a perfect world being able to switch to a clean dry pad for each panel and a couple for the larger panels like the hood and roof, (depending upon what you're working on), is the fastest way to get through the correction steps, which take the most amount of time.

Somewhere on this forum I think I wrote something on the topic of how many pads you need to buff out a car... just not sure where...

But more is better...

The pads don't have to be brand new, just clean and dry, so that would be more clean and dry used pads or clean and dry new pads.

When I first bought my PC, 2 ea 6.5" orange, white and red CCS pads were recommended as a place to start. I have a picked up a few pads more along the way, but not enough.

The first time I corrected my car, I had to clean the orange pads a couple of times, on top of your "on-the-fly" method. I never felt that I needed as many white pads.

It sounds like 6 orange is a safe number if one doesn't want to clean pads mid-stream by hand. Maybe Bobby's method will save me a few dollars. I will probably pick up 3-4 whites as I move to 5.5" pads.

Any alternative uses for the 6.5" reds? I don't have a dog anymore for frisbee catch...