Automotive Buffing Pads explained - History, Types, Using and Caring For

[Music] four hey whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa i i thought we were doing a pad demo i mean i brought my own pad we're gonna make pads today right i mean i just we're good i got phone so did you take a nap on your office no no no no i brought pads you were doing well you already have them pre-made but i was bringing my own foam lake country and you know they gave me some phone we are going to talk about paths but i thought i'd share a buffing technique tip first oh all right all right tips and tricks first all right hey um thank you all for coming into uh another live session of i don't know what you want to call us facebook live auto geek whatever you want to call it if you have any questions or have anything that you want answered over buffing buffing pads i should say post them down in the comments down below and i'm gonna take my phone since you don't go that way you're not gonna how about this for a title auto geeks by the seat of your pants by the seat of your pants hey that works all right all right well hold on one sec let me get over here thank you all for tuning in i do appreciate each and every one of you that tunes into these little things no doubt hey thanks for being here and uh before we get started about pads and as you can see up here i got a lot of different pads and i don't have every pen on the market but i got a great representation and this this talk isn't so much about the pad what it's made of it's about the practical aspect how you and i are going to use these pads because that's what's really going to be the most important you when you go out to the garage to work on whatever your project is but before we get started i wanted to share a little tip now a lot of the tips i share when it comes to detailing cards are just techniques that i've learned from trial and error over my career in the detailing world but there are also things that i share in all my classes and the people that's in my classes some come are absolute newbies they've never used the machine and some come as seasoned veterans they know a lot but i still cover all the basics just to make sure everybody's on the same page here's the first tip i want to share whenever you're buffing out the roof the hood or even the trunk lid especially on larger cars trucks and suvs the big beasts the big things yeah what you want to do is you want to start in the middle of the panel from the side and work your way out so as yancey was walking in i've already started at the back window i've been working my way up and i'll just kind of demonstrate what i mean by that i'm going to start out here in the middle i'm making my section passes and remember a couple weeks ago we talked about counting that would be six seven oh he's counting again hey there's my eight section passes but i started from the center line you can always find the center line by finding the rear view mirror oh well actually that has a little piece of chrome right in the middle it does have a p it has a clip on the stainless steel trim but that's how you'd find center and then work that section and then work the section closest to you and why is that and the reason for that is it's not a deal breaker but every time you go to buff out a car you can't be like guessing like hmm how should i buff out the car today you need to put into practice what i would call detailing best practices things that you just do normally over and over again because they make sense and it makes sense to buff out the center and work towards you because if you buff out this section and then move to the center you're going to be dragging a lot of times your cord or your elbows or your arms and possibly marring the paint that you already polished so just as a good practice start at the center work towards the outside and then when you go to wipe off your residue here's another little technique don't wipe off the complete far away edge and when you go to the other side you can see where it's at you're so smart see where you left off at anyway uh that's a little technique tip and gosh while i'm here a lot of times um whatever whatever tool whatever compound polish or cleaner wax i'm using whatever my first step product is so sometimes that's cleaner wax and aio sometimes it might just be a polished sometimes it's a true dedicated compound but whatever that product and pad combo is as i'm buffing out the car the other thing i'm going to do is i'm going to hit the glass yeah that makes sense yeah it's just because i'm already at it and usually your first step product is going to be your most aggressive product especially i'm using a compound right now but paint gets a dirt film on it and everything on the outside gets this dirt film and it's also on the glass and a lot of times you can't see it but it's there so just you know turn your polisher on run it over the glass a few times glass isn't too too picky about what you use on it longer than rocks and metal shavings it's not that it's not the glasses are too picky as long as the product you're using is clear coat safe it's glass safe but this is only for what i call topical polishing removing the film if you've got scratches in the glass and the wiper marks and stuff yeah wiper marks or pits from rock chips that would take a polish called cerium oxide so one of my best practices is whenever i detail someone's car i always polish up the glass that way when they show up to pick up their car not only is the paint all glossy but the glass is glossy and it just gives it a total bling look and on these older cars if you look up here a lot of these older cars they have stainless steel chrome and nickel trim and just like the glass stainless steel chrome nickel even aluminum they don't really care too much what you polish them with now there can be a case made to say there are specialized polishes for stainless like there is aluminum that's true but i mean as you're buffing at the car if i just take and buzz over this just trim just a couple of times trying to clean it up pretty good as i'm getting the glass in the paint it's going to pull that oxidation off and it's going to brighten that trim up as i'm working around the car and you can see all that black stuff came off on my back i'm pretty nervous so so you know you pulled something off but it's just it's just a way i always like to try to kill as many birds with one stone as i can as the saying goes work smarter not harder and that's that's a that's a saying that's thrown around pretty loosely and usually what i find is i find people saying it but then never show me how to implement it okay so there we go let me sit down off here before i fall yeah that'd probably be a wise idea i don't want to have that documented oh my cord's falling off okay so today we're going to talk about buffing pads and as you can see i got a lot of different buffing pads here but one of the key things when i originally brought this topic up to yancey and i i think some other people brought this topic up too was when we talk about detailing a car if you're just starting out normally you'll buy a polisher and a lot of times you'll buy a polisher in a kit and the kit will come with typically one cutting pad one polishing pad one finishing pad so enough to get you going but you need a lot more than that exactly it gives you enough pads to kind of get you going but the problem i always see is some people think that's what you need to buff out a car and that's just enough to get you started and the reason why is because and i'm going to show you with this this is kind of a bad example answer because i got it all dirty already yeah i already got a blackened with the aluminum but i wanted to show the metal polishing but here is a fresh clean this is a lake country six and a half inch force hybrid orange foam cutting pad now what's was right now it's clean and dry if i run my hand over i can feel i can hear it i can feel a sharpness to it it's sharp when i mix this with whatever my product is a compound or maybe an all-in-one it's going to get right in there and start correcting the paint removing swirl scratches water spots and oxidation after i've buffed out half that roof this pad is no longer sharp yeah you can't hear it it's soft that's because that's the nature of foam when it gets wet it becomes softer and if i tried to continue around the car using that pad it's gonna it would take me more section passes more times to do less work i'm gonna be less effective with my time and as this pad starts to saturate down to the velcro adhesive that holds the velcro on you got to remember all these different orbital tools that we're all using nowadays when you crank that sucker up to high speed that is what i describe it like this it's a violent action okay it's not so bad on the one if you're just putting wax on you crank this thing up to the six and then you push on it and you buff for hours that's a violent action under pressure over time the product's going to go into the adhesive to the velcro you'll see it start to show up on your backing plate this isn't too bad but it'll show up there and what it's going to do is i like to use the term torture it's going to torture ear pads and they're not going to last very long now if you took and purchased extra pads and say after i did half the roof before i go to the other side and knock out the other half i put a fresh pad on not only is this going to cut faster i'm going to be more effective with my time but i'm not going to punish my pads and all my pads are going to last longer over time so i'm going to protect my investment i think that ties into i know you get this question a lot is how many pads do i need to do a car that kind of ties into what you're saying so exactly let's go ahead and nail that right now since you're kind of there in a perfect world in a perfect world if you really wanted to work at maximum efficiency when using foam pads because microfiber pads are different and i'll talk about that but if you're using foam pads you'd have one pad per panel so if you think about it a two-door car has nine panels roof hood trunk lid fender door fender fender door fender is that right yes nine pounds i had my fingers out too uh a four door card have 11 panels and of course you know bigger trucks and stuff but the idea being is to is to use more pads more often so whatever the step you're doing you're getting the maximum use out of the pad because once a pad becomes wet and saturated it it's no longer working against you it's no longer doing what was supposed to do a cutting pad is no longer a cutting pad a cutting pad is now a finishing pad right you know and you would think about trying to remove all the swirls or scratches of the car the finishing pad of the compound would be ridiculous but most people don't think that way and i always like to tell people that i don't tell them this because i work at auto geek and i want you to go to the store and buy a lot of pads i don't care where you buy your pads but when you're getting ready to go out to the garage you know you need to go out there with more than one cutting pad one polishing pad and just one finishing pad makes sense so stock up on pads you'll work your you'll turn out better work faster because you're going to be more efficient with the process your less tire doing you'll be less tired of course and your pads are going to last longer over time well that works save money so that's that's really a key thing and of course you know if you look back here we got a lot of pads no we just got one or two that's it so anyway uh so that's one of the key things i wanted to talk about now when we talk about microfiber pads compared to foam pads and i'm just going to grab let me grab this is a brand new one i think is it just some new ones by buff and shine this is their euro wool you're a wool and the black ones of the year the euro wool blend and the euro fiber okay um now the difference between buffing with foam pads and what i just generally call fiber pads is the thickness for the most part sometimes the foam pads are thin but you have less absorbing material on a microfiber pad even the ones with a foam core have less foam overall than most foam pads so the pad so much even if it gets wet it's not it's not the foam that's what that you're buffing with you're buffing with the fibers and you can take and blast these with an air squirter or even you know brush them and get some of that excess product off there and go back to work with them so it's true that you can buff out a car if you're using microfiber or a micro wool pad it'll take you less pads because you've got the fiber cutting for you and saturation isn't as much as of a problem well that's the difference so one's a fiber and one's a foam so one's sucking in the other one's just kind of being right there the fibers aren't sucking the chemicals in no they just kind of hold everything off to the side we'll talk about pad cleaning too all right so now that we kind of cover some things that i wanted to talk about to help you when you're buffing out a car start in the center work your way out leave a residue line there so you know where you look this broadcast is brought to you by mike's tip tip glass and stainless steel polishing um the next thing i want to talk about is uh this phone the evolution of foam pads and um i happen to probably be one of the few people in the world we'll just start right here they have one of these things this is called too heavier than that this is called yeah the woollis wonder and um i actually had the opportunity in 1987 uh myself and some of the guys probably watching this video we attended what was called a train the trainer meeting in uh southern california with meguiars and before that uh weekend that it was a weekend long meeting learn teaching us how to go out represent the company the right way and teach these training classes i covered oregon washington idaho calling on body shops dealerships and detail shops and so it's a train the trainer ring but i got there a little bit early and they had a big lunch at balboa at the balboa bay club and i had the opportunity to sit down and have lunch with walter cotton the man that invented the foam pad oh there you go i'm gonna open this up like i said don't breathe hard i've seen the condition of that seems really bad so this came out in 1965 and i always like to put that in perspective for people but some of you might even know what i'm talking about when this came out gilligan's island debuted in black and white can you take that very front flip i can't it's that's so no no no no no no no no i'm getting to it okay thank you there we go oh wow hello see so the foam is completely deteriorating as i talk is going back downhill but gilligan's island came out in black and white uh the mustang was invented i know you must you must think guys will go well technically mike the most thing came out in 1964 and a half and i go i know but let's just call 1965. okay the beach boys came out with help me ronda and the rolling stones came out with i can't get no satisfaction so that's how long the phone has phone pad has been around and i actually at this moment i don't know anybody else that still has one of these in the box that's never been used even though this one never will be used can be used is a better question there's some foam uh and what's interesting is when i when i started calling on body shops uh back in 1987 um i would call on shops and it's a strange thought for us nowadays but i'd call in shops that all they'd ever buffed with was a wool pad that's kind of what you always see everybody thinks i'm buffing a car get out a wool pad well it made it really easy to uh to show guys how to leave better looking results when you switch them off of a fiber pad on the rotary buffer to a foam pad because instantly you get away from one of the main culprits of hologram scrolls and that's the fibers but that was you know that was a long time ago but it was a unique experience that we'll never have a chance to relive again because we're so far down the road in the detailing world anyway that's the first foam pad and later that pad uh evolved um this is uh this is a a a later version of it this is probably from the 1980s this is one of the few i got left in my collection i know rod kraft has a bunch of these but back then they went ahead and glued the backing right on to the foam pad so it was a one use it was a one use thing and once that pad wore out you just threw it away and you'd buy another pad so then down the road they started to add velcro okay so then you could attach the backing plate and as the foam pad wore off you could keep using the backing plate just throw the foam pad away so anyway so that's kind of some of the history on early foam pads and how they evolved from backing plates to velcro now a lot of you out there don't use rotary buffers you use orbital so there's a lot of great orbitals on the market but i want to share with you where the foam pad and orbital polishing came from and back and i think it was in the late 1970s it could be the early 1980s but mcguire's introduced this foam pad it was it was a version of the big pad and they also made this in a small version okay but it was this size but they put a a 5 16 threaded stud in the back of this thing upside down yeah this was called the soft buff six inch dual action buffing pad and if you were to read what these directions state they stay because remember meguiar's trainers like myself we were calling on body shops detail shops and dealerships and at a body shop it was really normal for the guys to have what's called a palm sander knock down bondo or do you know knock down primer uh use it for all kinds of things and we would show them how they could take this backing plate off and that's a 5 16 thread right there and you could attach this foam pad from mcguire's i wouldn't do that you can turn your palm sander into a swirl remover um so that's kind of where that came from but here's the more interesting thing i'm gonna leave this apart was um somebody at mcguire's and also uh around that same time at griot's garage they found this this is a wood sander a lot of people think this is a paint polisher it started out as a wood center it's the porter cable this is the 24 xp uh the early versions are just called the 7424 and there's also the 7336 and but both these these early tools were wood sanders but what somebody found out was this thing also used a 5 16 spindle and you could attach this pad that they were selling for air tools in the body shop to electric porter cable and that's the kind of the difference most people enthusiasts and and car owners don't have an air compressor yeah because all air tools by the way are air hogs but most people don't have a 60 gallon tank to feed something like this but most people do have an electrical plug-in to plug this in so they opened up this tool and that pad opened up the world of professional quality results scroll-free results polishing at home for just the average person anybody that could afford a 150 bucks on average to buy a porter cable a couple pads they could be de-swirling cars at home anyway that's kind of where this came from i kind of like to show that to people because a lot of the polishers that you're using today whether it's in the flex family the grills family the mcguire's mt300 a lot of them have their basic design or they stand on the shoulders of this lowly little wood sander and it still works and it still works great today in fact i always tell people you could buy all these drive over with the truck pick it up and keep on buffing it's really well built it's not the most powerful tool out there but it is one of the better built tools out there and it's great for entry-level people oh gosh it's a great tool and since we're talking about a little bit of wax history some of you watching this may remember this video this is the first full-length dvd that shows you from start to finish how to detail a car and a friend of mine richard lynn and i made this we buffed out a 1960 tuxedo black corvette and the title of this was how to use the pc for show car results and i actually did have people ask me did they mean did i mean computer a computer a personal computer to buff out a car no the pc it meant porter cable that's the lingo okay anyway so just some of the history there um moving along i thought i'd share this because this is interesting if you look at this wool pad this is this is an early wool pad again from mcguire's mcguire's really catered to the body shop and the oem you see all that yep okay what yancey what do you notice about the back of this it it looks like canvas it is and what what's it missing compared to this velcro velcro so guess how it gives a nut and a bolt knows that that's right back in the old days before they i guess invented velcro the way they would hold this onto a rotary buffer the washers and a bolt they had a nut here they would take a backing plate off a rotary just whack it like that but you would actually take and you'd have a spindle like this and you'd put this on and there'd be a net with a flat side to it that would clamp down on there and the theory being is you kept that auger that spindle really small and that nylon or that bolt flat so there'd be enough wool around it that you wouldn't ever dig that into the paint that's the theory all right question yeah you ever did that um if i did i don't remember great answer huh a safe answer i do have a i do have a an article on that topic was whenever you burn through somebody's paint you call that leaving your signature is that what it was you flip it so it's a good thing i don't have my signature on your car that's how early pads work now there was another style and my friend down uh in new zealand aaron he sent me this this is a really old yeah this is cool this thing is so heavy this is a rupez polisher it's called a type vander and i always have to wonder if vander might mean sander um it could be in italian uh but this is uh this is an early rupez and it would be a multi-purpose tool as my guess so a grinder sander and a polisher and the way this tool worked is it would have a hard backing plate on it and back in the old days you'd get these wool bonnets yeah you remember seeing that one in there and it's actually the skin in there oh yeah this is real sheepskin that's leather right there yeah and uh and it has a little drawstring here so you'd pull this around the backing plate and then you'd wrestle the string and tie it real tight and turn it on and that you're buffing and that's early buffing technology bolted on pads tied on pads nothing like what you guys get to do today see you guys have it so easy now yeah so easy and mike was there from beginning well i was there for some of it but not the beginning uh here's another little oddity and sometimes i may just kind of go through these as i stumble across them but you know a lot of people they think in the last couple years you've seen a couple companies come out with the foam pad that you could attach to a drill this thing is from at least the 1980s and one of the things meguiars found is when you're buffing with the drill you need to bowl shape that pad to make it easy to control uh but this is uh just one of the one of the few odd things i still have in my antique i call my antique wax collection but it includes a lot of different types of things in it his office is a museum it's a mess is what it is well i was being nice so uh anyway so some early technology there uh of course over here we have the what i always call a tob a traditional orbital buffer some people would call this the steering wheel buffer because it looks like the steering wheel i think every diy or they're like oh i'm at the parts store and oh look there's a polisher i can polish out my paint with 25 bucks and you're you're buffing uh they usually have a on off speed there's no variable speed to it they usually have a large bonnet and then the way these things worked is they got a big foam uh backing or padding on the backing plate and then you swap out to different bonds depending on what you're trying to do and i've been answering questions about this for so long that i'm going to go ahead and just kind of cover because back in the early days when i used to teach a lot of classes in irvine at mcguire's you'd have a car club come down have 25 30 people there you'd explain to them how to use back then it'd be the porter cable it had a mcguire's badge on it so it's the mcguire's g100 but it's basically just a porter cable and after you go through all this there'd be some guy in the audience and say hey mike i don't have one of those but i i got one of these can i do the same thing and then i'd explain to them in a real nice way that the answer is no and here's why those things came out at the time when the cars were being painted with a single stage paint what are called solvent evaporation lacquers solvent evaporation enamels and over the years paints like this if they weren't taken care of they would oxidize they'd actually turn chalky you could actually have a blue car turn chalky white with oxidation no problem with the tool like this because that paint was softer those panels were bigger and you could throw a compound on there and set it down on an oxidized hood it would kind of chew through that paint leave a shiny base so back or you could spread a wax out but back then with the old single stage paints that were softer and the main problem was oxidation these tools work pretty good fast forward to 1980 the first american-made car to come out the basecoat clear coat was the corvette and even though that early clear coat technology was on the soft side everybody knows paints have changed a lot and generally speaking just generally speaking modern clear coats are harder than old style single stage lacquers than enamels and so while this worked on the old style paints it doesn't work on new clear coats so now you need something usually with a smaller pad and a different type of oscillation motion and usually higher speeds of course greater bracelet technology and pad technology uh so anyway that's just kind of touch bases on the old tob the traditional orbital buffer okay so now let's look at some of the pads here and i printed out i typed up uh go into the history let me put the history of uh pat you got that on i have the graphic and it's coming up right now and and i printed this out because i didn't want to try to memorize this and and if i have any experts on pad history for example if someone from buff and shine or from light country is watching this and they go mike you got that wrong i didn't mean to i tried to get as accurate as i could from mostly memory or articles i've written but in 1965 we had the first foam pad in the 1970s or 80s they introduced the the um the soft buffed version of this and the one for the da the air the palm sander in the body shop and um actually in the 1980s this is i'm probably the only guy that has these i dug these out in the 1980s mcguire's launched their professional detailers line it was five different products in gallon jugs only and with that line they introduced three different pads they introduced the yellow polishing pad is the same pad they had out but that would be your in the middle you know polishing then they also introduced this foam cutting pad and it used to be a very beautiful pink and now as you can tell it's just aging and this again you can feel it it has a sharpness to it but this is one of the early foam cutting pads in fact it may be the first foam cutting pad that was ever made and uh what's funny is the backing has come off here's the backing there it says right on there w7000 hold that up for you cutting wow okay so they brought this one out they had the yellow pad and then of course to round out the system this is gonna look bad but i'm gonna go ahead and pull it out of this bag this thing is just falling apart because i this was the only one i had and i used it probably with some old meguiars number nine or something and this foam is just literally falling out this at one time was tan and this was the foam finishing pad yeah just be careful you don't want to break it all out so they had a three pad system they had fin cutting polishing and finishing that's what foam looks like after it makes you and look how thick they are too okay so early pads were very thick and large i'm gonna just set this over here and i'll probably take some pictures of it and then throw it away because i've been packing around for 20 years now 20 year old film there 30 year old from there anyway a lot of you guys have probably never seen these before these are vintage foam pads because you're a vintage type of guy uh it's good to not have to relearn everything put it that way okay so uh go going down my list or so that was uh that was then and then there was probably a lot of different pad advancements that you know that i'm not going to document but if we go up to um 2007 uh lake country filed a patent for what they call ccs foam and i got one of these back here and millions of people have used these i think they've used these at the oem level ccs stands for collapsed cell structure and they have these little divots that look like they were melted in there what they do is they kind of hold some product and release it as you're buffing they make the buffing smoother they extend the buffing cycle of whatever the product you're using so that was just a major advancement of course since then you've probably seen a lot of pads come out with designs in them but i think lake country was one of the first to really um come up with this idea so that was night 2007 2010 now this is interesting because i want to show you this look how thick this pad is and in 2010 lake country introduced what they called the hydrotech line can you put a comparison of the two and i will here's what makes this different look how thin that pad is to that pad it's about half as thick and here's where this is important until that pad came out all other foam pads on the market were all about this thick real thick and at that time one of the most common polishers on the market was either the porter cable or copies of the porter cable and the porter cable as you all know has this what's called a free floating spindle bearing design this thing is free spinning it's not gear driven it gets this power from the counterweight when you turn this on this counterweight gets a spin and you take it up to high speed it builds inertia and it helps to maintain pad rotation surely from inertia but if you hold it crooked or push down too hard the pad will stop spinning now when you put a thick pad on there the foam all that foam would absorb the energy coming out of the tool and dissipate it and that would show up to your eyes as the pad is spinning so when lake country brought out these thinner pads less foam better pad rotation so that was a huge improvement in the different pad options that we all had to choose from back then and you got to keep in mind this was before uh the rupes the the boss system polishers a lot of these cool tools that everybody's using they weren't even invented then everybody was using something that looked kind of like this it was either this or a knock off of this so the pad thickness was a key thing to getting the swirls and cars out and by going to that thin pad it helped us all to get the job done better and faster but that they weren't through there so let's go down here to 2011. mcguire's introduces the first microfiber da correction system i remember them being here we shot a video out here with them so here here's their current version of these pads this is called the extra cut look how thin that is that is thin and let's go back to what i was just saying with no foam interface no foam to rob the power coming out of a free spinning tool you put this on a backing plate and it's going to spin like a son of a gun in fact these early wood sanders if you think about it the sanding disc was really thin which is like a little bit five sheets of paper yeah it's like five sheets of paper just real thin so this had no problem maintaining pad oscillation and pad rotation same thing would apply to this there's no substance here to absorb the power and dissipate it then they've got a foam cutting pad that's the maroon one and then they got a foam polishing microfiber pad black and this is you can tell that they go up lightly slightly more yeah slightly a little bit thicker so they're basically taking some of the action away from the edge or the microfiber they're they're basically robbing the tool to decrease the cut yeah now but let's talk about why they brought out this is what most people don't know why did they bring out microfiber pads and i always see a lot of confusion on this so i've written a couple articles on this and i can explain this really easily what meguiars wanted to do it was actually very noble on their part so much of the detailing done in the commercial industry so at dealerships body shops detail shops and at auction sites was being done with the wool pad on a rotary buffer in fact let me just let me grab one of these and show you so it's it's a very visual thing and and there's a lot of reasons for this so here's a traditional wool pad here's your dewalt 849x big powerful buffer you could you can buff with this thing for decades and it won't ever wear out and you could buy one wool pad and buff out thousands of cars with this so not only was it cheap but it was durable the problem is is whenever you buff with a rotary buffer spins in a single direction each one of these fibers you like plucking those things each one of these fibers can you get that yeah i can see it put a cut in the paint millions of fibers millions of cuts and we call those holograms i like to get more specific and call them hologram scratches because technically that's what they are they're a scratch pattern that is mimicked by the direction you move the rotary over the paint it looks like they're kind of floating or have a 3d or a hologram effect and that's where they get their name holograms so what meguiars wanted to do was they wanted to find a way for the technicians in the industry to get the defects out of the paint quickly like a rotary but get away from the rotary so they went to the free spinning d.a and but when they went to this tool it's obviously a lot less powerful so then the question is well how can we get more cut out of a weaker tool and the answer that is is they went to a fiber pad instead of foam so here's a brand new backing plate and whenever you have one of these a lot of times they have what's called a compression washer don't lose the compression washer sometimes they'll just fall off as you're putting the backing plate they'll drop off and what what you'll do then is you'll have metal to metal contact in fact if you look right here you can see someone's assembled this one together and you can see where it scarred the counterweight whoops and usually when i'm out here if someone's done that i'll hear it because it'll be loud or dry it'll melt your backing plate so um always make sure that when you go to assemble these you have the compression washer and what this is it's a crushable interface to prevent metal to metal contact and of course they do wear out because they crush when you tighten them down and if you're ever going to assemble these you got the counterweight here and you got your pc wrench coming from the opposite side otherwise you're going to sandwich your wrench between the counterweight and the backing plate would be hard to get it off there so i use my thumb to kind of just like here i'll show you i always use my thumb to kind of hold that in place line it up put it on there and spin it just like that and then just kind of snug it down you don't got to be the hulk when you tighten that down yeah you want to get it back off you want to be able to get it back off okay so anyway then while i'm here this here's a tip we're always showing people simple things like this take a sharpie and at least put one mark on there and the reason why is because when you turn this thing up to high speed that yellow backing plate is just going to be a blur it's going to be hard to monitor pad rotation you put a mark on there it's kind of like a timing light if you've ever timed the car now your eyes can see either the past rotating or it's not if it's not then you can stop trying to figure out what's going on you see the line that means if it's staying in one spot you're not rotating you're not doing anything you're wasting your time that's true for about any free spinning polish out there they're supposed to us they're supposed to rotate and oscillate but you want both actions otherwise you're just not going to be really effective with your time so uh help me get back to where i was going microfiber pads versus foam right okay so to get guys off the rotary the powerful rotary which would get a car buffed out quickly but leave holograms in it now you got unhappy customers look at the car in the sun looks looks horrible they came up with a microfiber pad system so by creating these microscopic fibers on a pad that fit onto a da they increase the cutting action of the weaker tool which enabled technicians to go ahead and get the defects removed quicker never as fast as this but quicker with higher quality results and a lot of this push that they did meant educating and that's really hard to do you know everybody it's just it's hard to change an industry once it's kind of set in its way so you really have to hand it to meguiars for uh launching this system of course they had dedicated compounds and polishes to go with these microfiber pads but that's really what this system was about was to get the industry off of rotaries off to a safe day to get rid of the swirl problems happier customers and um less work and fatigue on the technicians also and also better for the pain you're not that's about right gonna say wouldn't that be better for the paint too because you're not removing as much not heating it up not burning through it not leaving swirls you know when you leave a swirled out finish uh for example if i swirled out the hood you know that that hood has a given surface area scratches would look like this you know you just have hills and valleys and that would probably make the surface area two to three times as big so it's going to corrode or oxidize even faster a long time ago dr david gadousi told me a smooth surface will last longer than a textured service i thought wow that makes sense so that's why if you buff with something like this and stop you're going to have a textured surface it might look smooth but in a microscopic level you're going to have thousands and thousands of voids in the paint from the scratches the fibers put in anyway that's where that came from now here's the other part that most people don't know when they were creating the system they weren't really creating it to be a show car polishing system it was a production system get the paint looking good not perfect but probably good and the reason why this is another topic of interest is because any time you're buffing with fibers the fibers are cutting the paint they're leaving a cut in the paint that's why they created this system to cut the paint faster without using a rotary action the problem is is with the da that cutting is not called holograms it's called micro marring so so the system wasn't really designed to put the best finish on the car it was designed to put a really good finish on the car and get the car pumped out without the all the defects of a rotary now as time has progressed of course the microfiber technologies increase there's multiple players on the market uh the chemicals that we use different manufacturers rupes griots mcguires you know a lot of companies have their own uh uh optimum polymer technologies they have compounds that are specifically formulated to use with microfiber and really what it comes down to is you can use a microfiber system and finish out really nice on your harder paints but as soon as you get into softer paints the fibers are going to tend to leave that scratch so easily that it's going to show up to your eyes it's going to dull the paint it's going to haze the paint so that kind of leads me back to one of the things i always tell people uh it's it's a it's a lionized speaker type out it goes like this a foam pad will leave a nicer looking finish more consistently over a wider spectrum of paint finishes than a fiber pad that's a true statement it doesn't mean you can't get great results of the fiber pad but overall the widest spectrum of paints super hard paints super soft paints foam is usually going to finish out nicer and a good practice is is of course always do a test spot so every time you're working on a car if you're thinking you want to use a microfiber you know here's the rupes microfiber here's the buffing shine here's the mcguire's you know there's so many microfiber options out there if if you're a microfiber system guy and you want to use microphone it's fine but do your test spot do the whole process all the way to the end then inspect that paint and it's always a good idea to chemically strip it and throw a swirl finder light on it and make sure the results you get are the results you hope and dream about that it looks just like you want it to look if you see any kind of micro marking all you've got to do is go ahead and start with microfiber but finish with foam i got i got something for you um now with the microfiber since we're talking about microfibers can't you bury the cut and everything you have problems with your wires falling off yeah um can't you vary the cut with the different compounds and stuff so you could have one pad but you could have either yeah that's the benefit to it you can vary it by the same thing with the foam pad you can vary the cut by changing the chemical but the the thing i'm glad you brought that up that is a great way to segue into this the difference let me grab something that you can capture can you capture these two fiber and foam here's the difference and here's something no one ever points out right okay so with this you've got thousands of fibers cutting the paint spinning oscillating with this uniform surface texture that's why this will finish out more consistently on a wider spectrum of paints than a fiber pad and you know most people know i'm not a big microfiber guy i i can do anything i want to do with a foam pad and if i have to do heavy cutting i switch over to a rotary with the traditional wool or one of the new micro wools i just i'm not i don't like the feel of taking a um i don't like the time it takes and i like the feel it takes to use microfiber pads on orbital polishes that's just my preference you know and uh like this 57 we started out i'm using a powerful gear driven tool the orange foam cutting pad i dialed in my test spot i found out that eight section passes remove the defects to my satisfaction and boom i'm done once i do the eight i move on to another section and it's gonna come out exactly like i want it to look i don't need to go to something more aggressive in the way of a fiber pad when i can get it done with the foam pad and i like the feel of it better that you know when you've got a nice thick foam cut cutting pad like this it's kind of contour over cords so it'll smooth out the buffing action for you okay another one for you um now would a lot i mean it would be like an industry trend or like something that people do that they'll use a microfiber for the cutting step then they'll come back with foam to clean that all up it's a great it's a great combination all right it's not my combination but a lot of guys can do that and and here's another little tidbit the microfiber pad um and i'm going to go by memory here but there's a gentleman i hope he's watching this his name is claude savigne and a lot of the real pro detailers in the world they all know that name he is probably one of the best detailers that was ever lived he's one of the smartest detailers when it comes to just knowing everything between the science of a mechanical action and paint and creating beauty and it was claude sauvignere that invented the microfiber pad it was originally used at the oem the original equipment manufacturer that means the ford assembly line the gm assembly line it was a pad that was made for what they call a polishing deck so if the car is painted you have a quality control person they would locate and find any kind of defects in the paint mark with the grease pencil they pulled that car off to the side someone would be there to usually sand it little small pad sand it down another guy's going to polish it out and they're going to get that thing back on the side as fast as they can and instead of doing a multiple system process with different pads and chemicals they'd have one chemical and a microfiber pad and they could get it good enough to go yeah good enough get that thing out the door we got an assembly line running yeah we don't hold up cars on scale but that's the history of it and that probably dates back to i'm going to take a guess the the sometime in the early 2000s i have a car that i detailed and documented in 2006 when i was using the oem microfiber pads and that would be uh five years before this was introduced to the public when the mcguires came out here and we shot that video with them yeah it was just awesome so for anybody that thinks well you know mike you just haven't spent time with microfiber pads that's why you don't like them no i've probably spent more time with them than most people just isn't you know something that you like just the personal preference personal preference people okay back to the history okay so we've covered uh back to the history 2012. okay so uh 2012 lake country introduces the ultra fiber microfiber pads now the only one i got left because this is a few years ago is a little two inch one here let me get my macro lens in here these came in five and a half and six and a half and they actually had one that had a really thick foam interface probably about as thick as this and they made that one for the rotary buffer but it just never worked that good because it generated a lot of heat and anything you're gonna do with that you could just do it the normal wall yeah but that would be uh that would be you know they're they're kind of taking their cue from mcguire's i always hate to say the word copy but you know um they they looked at what mcguire's doing of course they're a pad manufacturer and they launched their own line uh okay so then we go to 2013 rupas rupas introduced their blue and yellow microfiber pads i remember i was at sema when these came out and uh and the yellow is a polishing the blue is a cutting pad and they got these ventilation curvature hole slots in the back to keep the pads cool because fiber bath pads do tend to create more heat than a foam pad that was their first entry-level uh microfiber pads and those came in um i think they came in four inch and uh five and a half inch and six and a half inch or whatever the uh metric version of that would be uh then 2013 mcguire's introduced an updated da correction system and that's actually the system i have here i do not have any of the uh original ones from 2011. you can look on our youtube channel we have that video on there and then meguiars introduced their thin foam buffing pads there are there right here now this was another improvement in thin foam technology so again let's kind of let me move this out of the way here let's go back originally we're seeing a theme here yeah originally all the pads were at least this thick i mean i'm not going to name names but all the big pad manufacturers every film pad they had out was at least this thick an inch and a quarter thick okay so then in 2001 was a 2010 let me just put this down here um lake country introduced the hydrotech that's 7 8 of an inch and then mcguire's introduced their fin they call them discs because this is less is not so much a pad now and that was in 2014 foam buffing discs and these are 11 16 or 17.5 millimeters so compared to this look how thin that pad is i want that that's like three pads well that means on a tool like this a free spinning tool like this it's gonna spin like a son of a gun you know and that's what we need we need the pad rotate to do correction work i think that they started realizing that the more power more power more power is always better well just to actually just taking advantage of the power available okay there's even better words okay so then that was 2014 then 2015 griot's garage introduces their boss microfiber pads and thin foam discs and i have those right here and uh well here's a 2015 so here's their foam cutting disc and leica mcguire's look there's no foam backing it's just it's just the microfiber and the velcro very thin so this would be very aggressive they had a phone or microfiber polishing pad here you can see the foam interface so again that's getting some of the it's gonna yeah it's just gonna make it less aggressive and then they introduced their boss pads i only got three of them they have a yellow one here but look how thin these are how thin are those compared to they're they're just like the mcguires and the thin pro which we're getting to so here's here is a uh meguiars here's a let me get an orange one down here same thickness i'd say in fact this is just a little bit yeah it looks a little bit just a tick thinner but again there's that theory with input now also what do you notice about this pad and this pad what makes them different there's a hole in the middle it's got a hole in the middle now does anybody out there know what benefit the hole in the middle might have do you want me to answer that yeah you can answer the answer or cooling cooling exactly on tools like this remember when i had this apart i showed the spindle was in the center most of the heat generating the tool starts at the spindle and migrates out and when you have a piece of foam there it has no choice but to go into the phone that's where the metal is at so that's what it can do so it goes into the velcro it goes into the adhesive and it goes into the foam and you see the foam start to bowl out just the heat just destroys especially if you're the guy that only has one foam cutting pad and you're trying to buff out an entire car you're going to punish or torture that pad there was a viewer that he he said it ivan campos de llano sorry about that better cooling that's what he said so you put a hole there now the heat goes into the air so it lengthens the the longevity of the pad just by a simple hole there you're paying for less foam but you're getting a longer lasting pad out of it okay so that was the griot's garage entry into the foam pad i'm going to keep these up here because we're going to talk about one more that's going to go right along with that so then um 2016 lake country introduces their second generation microflora pads i think i have one here this was their foam polishing microfiber polisher pad you can tell by the blue interface there and they've upgraded their pads since then so i don't think these are even available anymore yeah so that's good it's the evolution always taking place getting better and better pads for us to use okay then a 2017 or that 2016 buff and shine introduces their euro fiber pads and as well i think justin said the other day in the video the cookies and cream pad yes actually i think they had a black yeah they just had this uh they call it uh oreo cookies or cooking cream the salt and pepper look yeah okay and these were a great pad too cutting and polishing and then in 2017 lake country introduced what's called the fin pro and they introduced these in uh three and a half five and a half and six and a half and i'm going to put down let's see here's their gray one really stiff so now you've got three super thin foam pads the meguiars the griot's boss the lake country thin pro all super thin all rotate exceptionally well out of even the weakest eight millimeter free-spinning random orbital polishers and this line here actually came with this very you can hear this listen looks like sand paper it's sharp i've only used this pad a couple times my life because it's so hard and so sharp and of course they got the grays extreme cutting then the orange cutting white polishing black finishing in red wax i'm glad you're there their needs well i think everybody says that there needs to be a color theory across everywhere like you just went down uh late countries they have a different color than bl buff and shine and yeah everybody now we're gonna be do you know why there was never a year i don't know why but let me let me go another i'm almost done through the history then in 2017 rufus rupas introduced the melee the their five millimeter gear driven orbital polisher notice i never use the word random when i talk about a gear driven when you have a gear driven orbital polisher there's no random direction pattern it's a fixed position or a fixed pattern but they introduced the milay and to go with the milay they introduced three different yellow pads and look how thin these are i've never used those do you like those ones yeah they work great on their tools right you know i tend i tend to be a systems guy so i'm not always the best guy to ask hey does this really work good on this guy's tool i don't know when i use that it's because i'm using a rupes tool with the rupes chemical but yeah super thin pads and then they also launched their microfiber pad systems to go with them a new um a new microfiber style a pile length they still got the vented slots in the back the yellow is finishing the blue you see the texture is the cutting so again always innovating bringing out and their stuff is all color coded the chemicals the pads everything that's one of the things about theirs they do color code their caps to their products now let me talk about the subject of the colors of pads i know everybody wishes there was a uniform color code a universal worldwide color code there never has been there never will be unless we start taxing all this stuff and come up with a world police car wax police you got nothing to do right yeah i got nothing to do so um there never has been and what's funny is if you look at if you look at this this here this is a foam cutting pad in the lake country line this is their cyan hydrotech foam cutting pad now they've discontinued it but they used to have a light blue soft foam waxing pattern so even the same see even one company doesn't even follow their own color coding it's just kind of like whatever the flavor of the month is they come out with the new paper oh joe what color do you want to do today in my how to books what i've always said is if you're going to get into machine polishing at some point it's your responsibility to fit once you figure out the tool you're going to use to go do some studying the information's out there on the interwebs and figure out the color coding for the pads you're going to use but here's one simple thing you can always do you can always take a dry pattern just take your hand and run it over the face and a foam cutting pad a will be stiffer it'll have a sharpness to it here's the cyan or the magenta magenta [Laughter] it's much softer it's easier to compress so you can use some real basic tests to kind of tell what a pad is okay um since we're on that and i know from watching you in your classes and everything like that you always have people feel them and you also have people blow into them what are you making them doing by blowing in good point so there's what's called close cell and open cell now a great example of an open cell is the rupes course blue pad i can take and blow into it very easily and it's because it's an open cell if i take this blue pad that's the called the hydrotech which means water tech or water technology this is closed cell and i cannot blow air into it and you can also kind of see if you look at these well this is kind of a bad example but see how this has like it's kind of shiny so these hydra tucks have a little bit of a shine to them yeah kind of a little sparkle a little gliss glisten there yeah okay so what that is and here's i love this analogy i think i think it was my friend eric dunn that explained this to me and uh eric used to work for lake country now he's over there with uh hybrid solutions and the wax shop uh real smart guy in paso but um imagine and we'll just use the car since we got here this this is this would be representative of closed cell so this frame here is the cell wall structure and the glass is the membrane so this would be closed cell now after they make the foam they have it in this chamber where they ex they create a explosion in there this explosion runs through the foam and it blows out all the windows so now you have the frame but the membranes are blown out and that's like open cell and the theory being when you take a closed cell pad like this the theory being because it's got the membrane intact liquids can't get into it therefore it'll keep the liquid trapped between the pad and the paint and that's where you want it you'll get more less saturation you'll get less pad saturation more use out of the product the problem is as we go back to all these tools that are orbitals when you crank them up that action is violent and that's going to vibrate that liquid right up into that foam pad so it doesn't really work like you think it would it's because the action kind of starts breaking blowing the windows out as you say no it doesn't it doesn't break the pad down it just gets the liquid past them it still good the pet still gets wet now here the problem with that is is is now it's going to be hard to get it out so when you go to wash it it's going to be harder to get out because it's close it's open it's closed cell uh the other thing is is when you have a close cell this is starting to go deep on everybody there's a term i think they get used to that in these videos okay so there's a term called tensile strength and um a closed cell pad has less tensile strength what that means is this is going to work yeah this is going to tear and sort of stretch oops there it is there's that little so the these pads that's why they don't last very long they they just they just break down because they the the characteristics of them people love for the way they cut or finish but they're never going to last as long as the open cell which has more tensile strength let me take a open cell pad here and show you that so here's a here's an open temp i can blow through it and when i when i do the same thing it it'll tend to stretch before it'll rip so it has higher than a softer foam too yes well but anyway you have the cutting pad too just open cell has higher tensile strength than closed cell therefore open cell lasts longer and you know what i'm when i'm trying to help people pick pads you know i don't want to pit any brand or type of pad against each other but usually i will share that little tidbit of information with newbies because of course when you're getting the machine polishing that's a lot of expense you're buying a tool you're buying chemicals you're buying pads and i want to make sure that they're going to have a grip they'll be happy with it and then down the road they can experiment try other types of pads so i got a couple other notes here we'll kind of touch on real quickly um let me just go through um i talked about this foam pads the fibers are a form of abrasive always remember that yeah i posted your link on the comments you increase the cut when you go from a foam to fiber because instead of having a uniform surface texture now you have individual fibers cutting the paint a good rule of thumb when using an aio okay so a pad in and of itself let me go back to this i use these pads a lot with my ai so this has a sharpness to it now this would not mar a very hard paint but if you're buffing a car with softer paint the pad by itself will scratch or mar the paint so a good rule of thumb when you're doing a one-step detail to somebody's car is to try to stick with polishing pads not finishing not cutting but right in that sweet spot the polishing pad and i'm going to go deep on you here again okay if you're doing this for money first of all if you're detailing for money uh if you're new to this you probably don't know this but you need to have different packages okay you need to have a package for the guy that hey i just want my car cleaned up okay i always like to pick on honda okay i've had a honda four-door cord great car but it's not a 69 gto you know it's it's a it's a commuter car and the guy that owns that he probably doesn't want a multi-step show car detail especially if he's five ten years old he just wants it cleaned up you need to have a package for that guy it's a lower price point you're gonna do less work okay then you should have a medium package and a high-end package so the guy comes with the brand new ferrari or corvette wants a ceramic coating you've got a package for that but you're gonna put more time more chemicals more pads more resources more energy into it it's going to be at a higher price point let your customers pick the with their budget and the kind of car they have the package that suits them best but for your entry-level consumer you need to have a great pack what i call package one now you could call this gold star silver star bronze star three star four star five star you can give them flowery marketing names i keep it simple package one package two you never make your customer work at trying to figure out what you're gonna charge them okay that's not their job uh but have package one package one should be a a simple aio all-in-one a one-step cleaner wax okay i use blackfire one step 3d speed is another one meguiar's uh was a d166 polishing wax but something that's going to correct the paint polish it and leave it protected one step and when you're using these types of products and you're targeting that customer you shouldn't be using a foam cutting pad you should be trying to stay in that sweet spot of a foam polish because first of all you never promised to remove all the swirls and scratches that's your package two or three so you should always under promise and over deliver but if if you well here's what's going to happen if you get a car that's got soft paint and you don't do a proper test spot and you buff it out with the foam cutting pad you wipe down and look at and see marring now you're buffing it down a second time to pull the marking out so your one step just become a two-step you're losing money so you have to look at how all these different parts kind of work together when you're running a business and and what you don't want to do is get yourself a situation where you oh god i gotta buff the car out a second time it's a time killer you'll be working for peanuts so yeah you're in this business to make money so try to stick with the phone policy pad now that said you know i've got enough experience and as well as a lot of other guys do that they can do their test spot and they can determine that pain is hard and they're going to get better correction with a foam cutting pad with their one step their aio and some guys might even use a microfiber pad with their one step if that paint is really hard but it all comes down to the first thing you should be doing every time you buff out a car test ball is a proper test spot you want to dial in your process to one section and make sure you're getting the exact results you want for the rest of the car before you buff out this car and then you won't have a whoops i got to buff out the car again okay so it's just important if you don't understand the concept of having packages to match your customers um micro marine i think i covered that production detailing i think i cover that i think i got everything i wanted to cover i would just say though back in the old days if we go back to this uh very ancient rupes uh vander what they call this thing uh type vander this thing i'm gonna guess weighs about 20 pounds and you turn this one weighs about five ounces okay so we've seen a lot of improvement over tool technology this by the way i call this my angry nano it's got a little faith on it he gets in there and he gets the job done wait a minute no i know you have a special pad for that that is it's your one and only pad do you not have that still this one yeah that pad for it sorry but the backing plate won't fit i could use that on the pixie though but yeah this is kind of a joke lake country made a bunch of us a couple years ago but tool technology has come so far but along with tool technology you need different pads and here's the good news here at auto geek we probably carry the widest selection of both fiber and foam oh we got pads people we got so many pads so whatever your pad needs might be you know you go to auto geek you can go to the detailing 101 facebook group if you're unsure what pad to get ask there i usually answer questions on the forum you can ask me there we'll help you get the right pass for your buffing knees but the one thing you've got to remember when you're starting to stock up on all the things you're going to need because you want to buff out your car this saturday don't forget to have extra pads now along those lines uh let me bring me back up so that way i'm not just talking about cleaning pads that's that's where i was getting at okay because i know that you know a lot of people like oh i get one pad and i can get it cleaner and i can just clean my pattern on the fly and while i'm sitting there going yeah you can but it's not not so much right you can and if that's all you got that's what you do there's a technique uh when it comes to a simple d a called cleaning your pad on the fly and that's where you use a microfiber towel or a terry cloth towel and and basically we have a video with you doing it yeah there's a couple of videos that they're floating around you just hold that towel shove it against there and turn it on and kind of just push that against there and pushing it will cause the liquid to move out of the pad into the towel plus scrape off some of the gunk on the pad and then you can go back to work but but the problem is is even though you cleaned it a little it's still wet correct and dry pads buff and cut and do everything they're supposed to do so much better than a wet soggy saturated pad and that's the only downside to foam is it becomes wet and soggy it quits doing what it was intended to do microfiber pad gets wet the fibers are still going to cut that then you just blow them out i remember the first car that i did when i started working yeah i think it was 18 years let's talk about how often to clean your pads so as you're working around the coffin i was going to say something but okay as you're working on the car so here's an example i have i had uh i buffed out one half of this 57 chevy here or as i like to call this old two-door ford um in the real world in the real world the best practice would be after you buff out a section take a nylon brush and just scrape off the gunk okay so now follow me anytime you're abrading the paint okay so you're using a compound a polish or an aio you have paint coming off the car and it's building up on the face of the pad now think about this if i buff out a section on the hood don't i have to take a towel and wipe that gunk off yeah yeah okay well that gunks on the face of the pads it didn't magically disappear yes it's just right there so you've got to take it off and what you have on the face of the pad are two things that build up you have spent product okay so whatever your compound polisher cleaner wax is as you're doing your buffing your section passes and cycling that product it's becoming worn out theoretically it's becoming worn out i know that you can make an argument for smack products don't ever wear out but but just theoretically it's your it's spent it's used up you also abraded the paint so the even the clear coat you might not see because it's clear but it's on the face of the pad so if you don't clean it off and you go to add fresh product now you're going to watch this because i'm a wrapper you're going to pollute it and to dilute it oh god so if i put this on a dirty pad this fresh product is going to mix with the old product it's going to dilute it going to dilute its cleaning or braiding ability it's going to pollute it you just put pristine clean product with dirty icky product and the resulting residue that's left on the paint is going to be stickier or gummier to wipe off and that's going to tire you out so in a perfect world you would clean your pad after each section pass and if you've got that kind of time go for it i usually do every other section i go ahead and just just hit the section or section path every other section i buff out okay so i'll buff a section buff section clean up pad buff section buffer section clean my pad and by then i'm usually ready to swap out to another pad anyway okay so uh that's one thing you can do now and if you don't have a fancy this is called a pad conditioning brush you could use this is yancy's toothbrush yeah yeah that's yeah sure i brought it in just for this now here's a pad washer there's a couple of these on the market this is the one by my good friends doug lamb and his wife and kids over there grit guard and these things work great for cleaning pads but really they're the kind of thing you want to use at the end of the day you don't want to take one pad that the one pad that you got and you know clean it put it back on your buffer because theoretically you're doing what it is somebody might not know what that is oh gosh i'm still in the bear so i know all this stuff okay so this is a pad washer let me show you how this works first you take out you take out the the grit guard insert okay and this has a small grit guard insert on this top of it that you can move around to put pressure on different parts of the pad and then on the inside of this thing are what are called uh water pumps now see the little hole here in this plastic cup and there's a stainless steel spring in there stainless steel so it won't rust and there's four of these and they sit on what's called the vortex base sport the vortex base i love that name and then it's got these little rubber feety things don't lose these because these are what keeps this thing from spinning in a circle in the bucket when you turn your polisher on and spin the pad in a circle against the grit guard insert then of course you fill this full of a pack cleaning solution and then what you're going to do is when this thing is in there inside the splash guard lid put this on your buffer and you pump this up and down as you run the polisher and it causes the cleaning solution through the hole and the top of these uh water squirting cups to to force the cleaning solution up into the foam pads and then as it scrapes across the top of this thing it kind of squeegees out all the compound polish and wax residue and that's how these things work and it works great but and then after you're done pumping it like that for you know 20 seconds then you're supposed to lift this up still inside the splash guard lid okay you lift this up so you're kind of off the grit guard thing then you turn your speed up and through centrifugal force the water slings out okay so that's how they work and they do work but still when it comes to foam pad your stuff pad is still gonna be wet and as i said a couple times your dry pads buff the bass when it comes to foam dry pads so save this for cleaning your pads at the end of the day place them out some place to air dry and they'll be ready to go for the next day but it's really what's what a better idea would be is to get more pads and as you as you buff out a panel put that pad aside and switch to a clean dry pad now when it comes to chemicals this is um the this is a citrus based pad cleaner and this stuff we're going to make it really good and this comes into a bunch of different brands this is the wolfgang branch i turned the label a little bit towards me the other way there you go this is the wolfgang branch we haven't even have smell-o-vision because that smells good yeah and it's a citrus basin it works good it does it just emulsifies the junk and what you can do is take and as you're working around the car my antique pad is getting dirty well you're the one that put it in there get a bucket full of like three gallons of water maybe four gallons put some of that solution in there and when you pull the pad off stick it in there take your hands and squish it to get the cleaning solution and just let it soak till the end of the day then use the packaging when you're cleaning or then wash it under running water or like me i throw most all this stuff in a washing machine we i mean look back here we go through pads at such a scale i do not have time to clean one pad at a time so everything goes in the washer you'll be still doing the ones from your car everything goes in the dryer except for my wool pads and um and for the most part they hold up pretty good sometimes i lose um the velcro on one yeah let's go right there because i know we always have i know our detailing 101 we always have questions about can you do them in the washing machine why don't you give them your technique on using the washing machine first let me say hot water cold water high heat low heat this time the only company i know of that states you can use the washing machine to wash their pads is meguiars they're soft buff seven inch pads it used to be they said you could wash them in a washing machine i don't know if that's changed you might want to check the directions all the other pad manufacturers they pretty kind of frown against that because this is just my theory my guess because once in a while when you wash them in a washing machine in a dryer the velcro comes off and then you'll call them and cry and that takes up a lot of time for an eight dollar pad so instead they just tell you don't do it at all now they got nobody calling and crying see so once more if you do that you're gonna lose a pad just eat it okay if you want to get some epoxy or some goop glue and glue it back on i've done that good good it works pretty good you know if you get the pattern first or the wind but here's usually what i do is um i wash all these pads with a microfiber detergent in the washing machine we have a wash machine out there with the old-fashioned uh vein in the middle in the middle so there's no agitator agitating action action going on i uh i wash in um i watched in cold water only because we don't have a water heater out there if i had a hot water heater out there i'd wash them all in hot because hot water helps to dissolve and break things down better than cold water it's really simple to figure out all you guys out there that have owned anything but a chevy and it's broken down so you had to replace the starter motor i've seen chippy's doing right now if you had an old ford or a mazda or you know porsche you know at some point the starter motor breaks you go down there you take it out when you're done your hands have black sludge that's just impregnated into the pores of your skin now you could go to the sink and wash them with soap and cold water but we all know to wash them with soap and hot water would get them cleaner so heat helps to release oils and greases and dirts same thing in the washroom now when it comes to the dryer most people would make the case that using the high heat because some dryers get pretty darn hot over time you're gonna cause damage to the foam or the fibers or in the case of microfiber towels to the microfiber towels so i usually use like a medium heat on that put it on the longest setting by the time i get back out there everything's dry if not if you could pan over there look i got my wool pads i let them air dry i don't think you're gonna make it over there i don't throw my traditional wool pads in the dryer i do throw them in the wash machine then i just lay them out to air dry and cue the car outside so uh you know it's a lot of different ways to clean a pad in my how-to book i think i show five different ways to clean pads um if you've got a utility sink that's a really good way you can just sit there and run it under water and squish it and squish it till everything's come out smoosh it and then let it dry but here's something else i see a lot of questions about this uh people will ask or or complain or ask for help getting a wax or a sealant out of a foam pad now the reason it's hard is because by their very nature waxes and sealants are not water soluble your professional grade compounds i'm using the pinnacle compound on this old chevy here this is water soluble you could throw this in a a bucket mixed with water it pretty much disperse throughout the whole thing if you took a bottle of wax or a bottle of liquid sealant or liquid wax and you dump it in a bottle of water you're going to find just like oil water it's going to separate out it's not going to want to congeal and become one and the same thing's going to happen you try to wash this out of a pad it's not going to like the water so i don't even care about the soap it's going to get all squishy on you so one of the things i do is i always wash similar pads with similar pads i will wash and you got to remember we do things on scale here i might have 25 people in a class and if we buff out 10 cars in two days we're gonna dirty a lot of pads so i can make complete loads of nothing but rupez blue coarse foam cutting pads complete load 20 30 pads in there and wash them and then dry them and then stack them up and then wash the next tile so i i wash pads that have been used with like chemicals together and i save all my wax pads so if say we machine you know i teach ceramic coating synthetic scents and waxes i like to show everybody everything but at the end of a class when everybody's gone home and i'm out here cleaning up the garage and doing laundry uh at some point i'm gonna have a whole bunch of soft foam pads of some brand filled full of a liquid wax and um i will throw them in the washing machine and usually run them through like at least two times and they'll come out pretty clean but they usually won't do it the first time because waxes look like they have to break it down a couple times they're not soluble even with good chemicals they're not well that just shows that they're doing what they're supposed to repel water anyway i think that's all we got i i have this here this is the green paint off of uh steve mcqueen uh steve mcqueen's jaguar xk uh whatever it's the xk ee or something like that it's the it's the it's the jaguar in the peterson museum when we had our tv show we buffed it down it was actually mike stoops he took one of the pads and said i'm gonna save this because this got the paint off of a car that steve mcqueen drove so i did the same thing i set this thing aside or maybe it was uh joe fernandez that did that and our first tv show lake country they made us uh some pads that's going back with our logo on the back that's the one i can't find the one for competition ready they actually made us uh a pad for our competition ready tv show but this was our first tv show called watson auto geeks garage where you see me stumble around through other people's garages trying to showcase some like a like a chris jacobs or something and uh i was better at showing how to detail them than showcase the cars themselves even though i am kind of a car guy um i think that's all i got i got one more thing up here i can show you that's a spurred us for cleaning wool pads rotary buffer yeah you don't use those arm clothes here's something a lot of people may not remember this but probably about 10 years ago maybe 15 years ago these were really possible sure buff yeah this is a pad for uh finishing out fine wood like a wood dining room table and i think it was kevin brown actually that discovered these and introduced them to the card polishing world i think primarily is a cutting pad for extra cut instead of a foam pad this is before we had all these different microfiber pads to choose from but we still have these at auto geek i don't see much talk about them anymore but they're around that's all about those these are called foamed wool pads they're kind of freaky but this is that synthetic wool correct it's a it's i think it's a it's actually a real wool but it has a foam a foam inside of it yeah it has foam around the fiber so it's really cushiony and it gives you a real gentle type cutting and is there a difference between the blue and the purple um one's called the force hybrid uh blue wool pad and one's called the purple wool pad i think that's the hairs of course lake country just uh brought something out very similar to it a foam wool pad so it offers good cutting but also very good polishing especially on your your harder paints so anyway lots of pad choices after i set this up out here i caught oh my god what have i got myself into can i talk about all this stuff for an hour you've talked about it for an hour and 17 minutes so far we did it anyway and of course remember the tip i shared at the beginning when you're working on the large panel start at the center work your way out that way you don't induce the effects into parts of you just you got to have you got to have a system to approach a car that you don't got to think about each time it's just a reaction you just go to work all right cool let me bring myself up on here i'm going to scroll back through the comments um there's one more thing we're going to do but we'll do that when we shut the video off and you got to finish out this car yes oh you got jokes i did half the roof you can do the rest oh so i get three quarters of the car you get yeah okay um everybody that said hi hi glad glad you guys are tuning in uh the very first question that i have um i got the new uh grails g9 random orbital what's the smallest backing plate you can use the smallest backing pack grios recommends is their five inch backing plate spinning turning and turning their five and a half inch pads i know some guys are going to throw that three inch pad on there they what grails would say about that is that tool and that backing plate are not optimized and the other thing is is when you put a when you put a tiny little backing plate on a big tool when you're buffing out horizontal surfaces the tool becomes what's called tippy it's okay on a vertical side because you're holding the weight of the tool up but on on a horizontal panel you tend to let the weight of the tool take over and if you're not careful it'll tip over and i'll send that tool on the hood bouncing around that's called a signature so so there's a difference between can you do it and should you do it uh can you do it yes the three inch backing plate from grios and other manufacturers says a fine five six inches thread it will attach to that tool should you do it i'll leave that up to you yeah what i'd rather see it do is he can buy the griot's g8 and get it get a smaller polishing smaller tool all right this one i think is funny i think he's having a jab at you but what do you call it it's robert so we we all know love and robert robert dietzel easy what year did swirl removal become such a thing um gosh i would have to say go back to the uh or you actually have an answer well um mcguire's uh launched a um a video in the early 1980s called power polishing and it was a video of mike pennington using the porter cable on a mustang hood and back then they were the only game in town they really had the whole system the tooled pads and the chemicals that the average do-it-yourselfer could do this in their garage and the internet took off in the mid-1990s i remember reading a statistic that in 1995 aol only had a half a million subscribers okay so it was in his growth and as a growth industry back then uh but as soon as the as soon as everybody started getting desktop computers and getting on the internet and then education just kind of started to go out throughout the world then paint correction or sromo became more of a known topic but i think i think meguiars should get some of the credit possibly griot's garage too for really early 90s mid 90s no 80s 80s 80s out in the 80s really for introducing the the average person to the stuff that the body shop guys probably already knew about the body shop guys would always be way ahead of it i wouldn't give the dealerships any credit for this but body shop guys this was their bread and butter was painting cars sanding them and then buffing them okay all right uh this one's coming from philip true you trey you uh what is your favorite pad to use rna d.a mike i know the answer it just depends on the da i i do tend to be a systems guy so if i'm using if i'm using rupez polishers i always use rupes pads if i use griot's polishers i'll tend to stick with the boss pads you know believe it or not the rupes pads spin and or as i like to say turn and churn and hopefully not burn really well on the grill you can't tell he likes rhyming grills the grill's boss tools on the on the porter cable i'm a big fan of just your basic um either your um lake country flat pads okay or uh which are about the size of this right here but only an open cell um i i have access to the thin pro but the thin pro are so thin i don't need to go that thin to get good action out of that or i like the buff and shine six inch pads or even the lake country uh hdos or sdos all those are really well matched to these smaller eight millimeter free spinning tools okay i am definitely an open cell phone guy but most of the time when i'm buffing out a car for at least the correction step i'm using the beast this is the super beast and i'm using these big these big six and a half inch force hybrid pads okay all right um samuel i think we answered all your questions about open cell and close cell while we were talking in the comments uh basically open it let stuff in close it keeps it in between the surface and the pad still gets saturated but the open cells are a little bit stronger correct yep that's a nutshell version all right um michael matchlat i think i got your name right i am not the person to be our name how do you tell hard paint from soft paint you know i covered that in my how-to book oh that's uh nobody likes the answer but if you think about here's how first you got to buff out a whole bunch of cars okay um and and i explained this on my how to book that someone that's brand new they just got a polisher pull it out of the box they walk out to the garage they're working on a turquoise 57 chevy there's no way they're gonna know that it's been hard to soft they haven't buffed out any paint but but here's how you would tell is if you took a an established brand for a compound i think most people would recognize maguire's ultimate compound you could buy a damn near anywhere it's pretty much bubba proof it'll remove swirls and scratches all day long if you take that in a simple foam cutting pad or foam polishing pad on a simple tool and you go out to the hood of a car you need to do eight section passes so you go to the section once twice you know eight times wipe off and swirls and scratches are gone i think using that compound you could assume that that pain is probably um in the medium it actually could be anywhere the way you test the pain is you you don't do all the suction passes you wipe off and you rate the the ratio of defect removal that's how you test the compound but but it's really hard to know if you're brand new so i always tell people as you're buffing out cars especially doing this for money you know once you dial in whatever tool pad and chemical that that's going to be your thing every time you buff out a car you need to lock into your brain you know how well did the scratches come out of that painting you're working it harder or was it like they just come out you know last year or this year and last year i buffed out i had a 1988 porsche 928 with the original single stage paint and i had a 1994 porsche with the original basco clear coat paint and i corrected those with lake country black foam finishing pads and fine cut polishes another way of saying that is that looking at it you scratch it it was super super i corrected it with this pad okay so you just have to get experience but you got to be paying attention you know but i'll tell you one thing if you take an aggressive compound a foam cutting pad and a powerful tool out to the card you put down about five pounds of pressure and make eight section passes and the swirls and scratches still there that's probably pretty hard pain the the last thing you want to do is make generalizations i know a lot of people will make it maybe this forged that then all that they'll say that like it is pretty consistent to say uh most hondas have soft paint that's fairly known and that has to do with uh the the type of paints that they shoot over in japan basically and the the solvents and the the fact that they don't got an epa to monitor what they're using and injecting into the air but most people and myself included would think that most of the audis that i've worked on had very hard paint yeah german yeah most of the um i think somebody even actually said that in the comments i think audis have had some of the hardest paints i've ever worked on yeah paul dorsett but i don't work on tons of audis i tend to be a a detroit iron guy i like stuff like this just because there's no plastic trim that's why um because i'm lazy but um i actually have a write-up on you can google this uh making generalizations add the word car paint mike phillips maybe you had the word audi but when i was still in mcguires two guys came down to mcguire's with these really cool um blue audi station wagons they were low factory builds and that paint was as soft as butter so me and everybody else every time we worked on the audi it was super hard here's two factory paint jobs that were so soft the only way we could finish them out without marring was with the cleaner wax that's one of my cheater techniques by the way if you've got really soft paint and you're having a hard time finishing out and wiping the product off without reinducing swirls and scratches one way you can do that is with the quality cleaner cleaner wax that you let fully dry because wax by its very nature is a dry lubricant you know it's like when you wax a set of snow skis or a surfboard or when i was a kid mom gave us a piece of wax paper and we would wax a still slide then you at the park and you go down the slide you go down really fast wax is a dry lubricant you didn't wrap yourself in it so that way you don't have but if you can if you can find a quality one step cleaner wax and finish off the thin film coat and let it fully dry as you wipe it off the wax because part of the lubricant enable you to wipe it off without putting scratch back in that's one of my cheater techniques all right let's go down kirby thompson hey kirby uh yancy asked mike later when used microfiber pad compared to a wool type pad versus hard verse soft paints well hard paints you just just default if you really if you really need to cut a hard paint then a fiber pad is going to outperform a foam pad any day of the week no matter what the tool okay so start with fiber to finish out with foam okay ivan componzano i think i said your name right is it better to polish in the dark or with a garage light on well hopefully you're not in the pitch dark i hope you have some light you know because you need light here's the truth about that is um uh there's an article you can google this it's called um wet sanding factory paint versus custom paint add mike phillips and you're gonna see a picture of me buffing on a 1956 lincoln premiere and you're going to see my test spot in the front driver's fender and if you look in the place i'm at i'm in the third level of a four level parking garage and all i have for light are a few eight foot fluorescent bulbs and i completely wet sanded cut and buffed that car in what i would call low light and here's the point if you dial in your test spot okay you know using this compound with this pad for eight section passes gets that to the where i'm happy you could blindfold me and i could repeat that or the rest of the car and get the same results oh i think i'm gonna put that on a test that should be a life even what do you guys think blindfold mike doing in detail well my point being is once you die on your process you don't need this light or you don't need this color painted wall you're going to repeat the same process to that paint over and over and over again regardless of the light or the color of the walls it becomes just a routine it's all about dialing in your test spot once you dial in the test spot you're going to get to the same consistent results unless one of the panels in that car by chance has been repainted repainted and maybe a softer or harder and that could throw it off that's very rare that's very rare and a lot of times what if you're using quality abrasives tools and technology and technique you're still going to get great results you know right but there was an instance where um where i've come across different panels that were repainted and they didn't cut as well as my initial test spot showed i could get away with so i had to rethink it and re start over something more aggressive yeah if you see this not working later on then well that's called focus on the task at hand be paying attention you wipe off you go wow swirls of scratches are still there well maybe something changed on that panel yep okay um roll fear uh are ccs pads always thicker or are they thinner versions out there well the thinner version is the one that i brought out here and it's a 7 8 right here this is 7 8 of an inch so in the smaller size they're thin but if you go to the six and a half there's still about an inch and a quarter they just the width i think they actually make a thinner one but i i just i would have to go check i can't remember the auto geek store would have that information and so would uh lake country manufacturing their website uh yeah um yeah uh kirby thompson said uh bs reflections kit we just released a video on that go to the facebook auto facebook page nice kit and um the auto geek youtube page and that video is on there by the way the the new buff and shine box kit with justin lubato on it i i think uh that's really a genius idea but here's how i position that if if if you're not sure the pads you need for the tool that you're you know everybody when you first start out you buy a polisher or whatever it is and if you're still trying to figure out which pads to get buying that box kit is going to give you was it five or six different pads five different pads you could try them all out but the thing is is once you go ah i really like that that works for me and that works for me that's when you go buy just 20 of them right exactly no no no you don't go buy 20 kits because you're only going to use like two of you're only going to gravitate towards two or three it's kind of like a sample box that'll be your system because every time you buff out a car it shouldn't be a mystery especially today especially if it's your own it's the same car you mean it's nice is right next to where you live you know a lot of people do not have access to the multitude of pads chemicals polishers and backy places like we offer hair uh here's a question while everybody's watching does anybody know what this is i brought this out just by happenstance does anybody know what this is answer down below you'll get mike to come to your here's a hint what color is the border it's my room you old-timers should know what this is old-timers now you're really dating your age okay now i'm gonna put it i'll put it right here all right you put it right there all right um clean pads every couple of sets and probably half a door they're talking about the how often you should clean your pads we i do believe that we covered that i covered that but take a a nylon brush a pad condition brush and after every section pass or every other section pass scrape off the residue you know you can use the clean the towel and then like after every panel then remove get it or switch out to a fresh pad all right better results more pads is better more pad more pad if anybody watching this video right now or into the future it's on youtube if you look at anytime i share a write-up like at some point i'm going to share a write-up for what i did to this car to take it from where it's at let me go wide because you can't yeah when i when i get to the point where i do my ride up and this thing looks glossy under fluorescence but it's all swirled out um i always stack up all the pads i use with the tools and the chemicals and that's to telegraph to you how much how many pads i used again when you buy a kit a polisher kit will come with usually a three pads a cutting pad a polishing pad a finishing pad that's not what it takes to buff out a car that's what it takes to get you started okay uh we're going back to philip again he has another one um what should i hopefully not a lot of people are using a pressure washer to clean their pants but hey that's so that's a viable way to do it i've no some of them i think would like totally it's kind of it's kind of uh oh i have i had one pad now i have three well you know as long as you're using common sense but yeah if you put a nice like fan fan spray tip on your pressure washer not the little point tip because that will rip right there but if you've got a way to hold it still like put your foot on it and hold it while you're blasting i would stay away from pressure some guys do that you know your wool pads but for me i throw them in the washing machine yeah throw them in the dryer i i yeah i would stay away from anything like that because you're then you're getting your body parts in there and yeah no it's yeah thoughts aren't cheap pads from places like alex aliexpress i don't even know what that is alibaba express or alex well here's the deal is um it could go to the foam that you i've only i've only looked at the foam pads down at harbor freight one time but i remember when i did look at them they had like three or four different colors and it also like the same same foam just a different color it wasn't like one was a sharp cutting pad one was a polishing pad was a finishing pad it was all the same foam just different colors and most of all the comments i read about them is they don't last very long so look you know pads are relative you know in context or the expensive i don't know you can make a lot of money off five or six pads buffing out a car if you're charging right right and you get a lot of use out of the pad so i don't really think pads are the most expensive component of owning a detailing business or even if look if you if you own a car like this or a brand new honda if you've got enough money to own either one you should have enough money to buy you know it doesn't pass yeah so it isn't the most expensive thing in the world for the hobbyist enthusiast or the professional so just buy good pads and don't regret it no one ever thing is too is that the quality of the pad you gotta think that's one of the things that is touching your paint it's the second most important factor abrasive technology is the most important because it's touching the paint first then the pad then the tool and then you so pads the using the right pad for the process is key and using cheap pads is just not a recipe for success all right we have a lot of people asking um go to paint uh pad combo for chevy paint black paint gmc paint um that's just where no you know it you know first of all it starts with what tool you have yeah because tool's going to determine the pad you use exactly you know so figure out your tool and your pad but there's a thing called doing a test spot and that's where you t you use you test the least aggressive product to get the job done what that means is is usually to start out with something like a foam finishing pad and a fine cut polish if you've got a car that's obviously swirled out that's not going to be aggressive enough so you'd at least start in the polishing range or the medium cut polish if that didn't work then you could go to a compound and a cutting pad but um to me everything starts with a doing a test spot but it also means you have to have finally figured out what brand of compound brand to polish and brand of you know the word is a i o cleaner wax and a i o all in one you need to find these three things those are going to be the three primary things you use to correct paint compounds polishes and aios and i talk about this all the time these three categories of products they either use great abrasive technology or they use crap for abrasive technology if they use crap you're going to get what's called micromart because the abrasive technology isn't any good and there's no way i can take lots of technique and make the thing that's touching the paint scratching it stops scratching it yeah so i always tell people if you ever look at my write-ups like i never use junk i only use the best stuff and i use a wide range of stuff we sell but if i'm using it you can trust it uses great abrasive technology i just wrote a brand new review for dr beasley's nano surface primers and i said i tested it on black paint i said this is some amazing abrasive technology i just wrote a review for the 3d one in the new 3d paint coating and i said the 3d one it's a compound polish it's amazing abrasive technology so you know over here i'm using the pinnacle advanced compound you cannot go wrong with this product it's 50 or 60 bucks a quart but so is and finesse it it's it's a you know there's products that are on the top shelf just like a good tequila you know you're not going to go wrong with your quality isn't cheap and cheap isn't quality yeah if you pick substandard stuff or you know there there's a couple brands out there i see this all the time in the blogos fear where people say hey you're wanting to say something else i i see hey i buffed up my car it's a black corvette and now the paint looks gray okay then they say what they use and automatically go gosh how many times have i got to read this people keep buying the stuff and graying their pain out with it what the gray is is anytime you scratch something clear say a windshield if i got a wiper mark what color is the scratch it's going to be a white screen it's opaque it's white when you scratch clear coat you make it gray you make it opaque you you're seeing it's opaqueness with black underneath you're making it gray that is called micro marring and every time you know i primarily work on auto geek forum and every time someone comes up i say hey tell you what let me just send you a sample something that uses great abrasive technology go over that thing that you use and also you'll see the paint go perfectly clear again so the most important thing when it comes to polishing paint is you've got to start out with great abrasive technology because it's touching the paint first in fact do you care if i just show you this i'll do a quick demo all right that then i got one more actually while you're setting up um paul dosset paul dossett does it paul you said it's a polishing cloth your your cloth that you held up yes no what's that polishing cloth oh what about it that's what you have up there the polishing cloth oh what is it yeah polishing cloth wrong it is possible what is it uh here it is it's it's the first microfiber towel introduced to the public by meguiars that's why it has a maroon maguire's now is known as the men in black but they used to be the men in maroon and mike pennington gave me that when i was down in uh mcguire's original microfiber towel that's one of them well mcguire's is one of the bigger names that had products at the retail level nowadays you find some at retail level it wasn't like that back in the 80s but they brought this towel out and introduced for the most part the american public to microfiber towels yeah jeff ness is the one that actually named it original microfiber towel by meguiars okay so this is a crook we'll just real simple here i've put some compound on my pad all right and when i turn this on and i i polish on the paint here it's so simple look what's touching the paint first the abrasives exactly what's behind the abrasives it is the path the pad what's behind the pad the tool what's behind the tool you the other tool the guy i am the least important thing here the most important thing is the stuff touching the pain it's doing the work and if you start with crap you're going to get crap you got to start with great abrasive technology and you can't help but get great results as long as you then match the pad for the product and the process you're doing you wouldn't use a soft finishing soft finishing pad if you got heavy swirls with a compound that wouldn't make sense you'd use a foam cutting pad so that's what i mean by matching the right pad but as long as you're using a great abrasive technology i mean i i show wow this the hood of this has single stage paint the top the roof is clear-cut i've only buffed out the roof so far have fun yeah and you're saying that the the pinstripes were all under clear i don't think so i don't think so yeah there's pinstripes are in here people with glitter inside and here's a good reason to do a test spot on each panel yeah i know exactly what you're getting instead of just assuming that the whole car is basically a clear coat and that you know there are it's possible that could be a um the reshoot hood a turquoise could be a turquoise uh overspray on a clear coat it could be i've seen it before well you've been around long enough um all right let's go one more question because you guys got a bunch of them in here let me okay can i think this is a good one i think we covered it ja here valencia can we use pads for polished aluminum trim bumpers wheels without clear coat if yes what kind of pads can you use pads for doing metal yeah i showed beginning this class he might not have been here at the beginning yeah if you look at this orange pad that turned kind of gray if you go back when this goes up on youtube and watch the video from the beginning i was giving a tip and a technique for buffing out panels how you start in the center and work your way out you don't start on the edge and work your way in and then i explain that whenever i'm buffing out a car whatever my first step product is in this case it's a compound but sometimes i'm just using a cleaner wax but whatever the first step product is while i'm using it i hit the glass and run it over the trim i don't get a fresh metal trim yeah metal trim i don't weigh i don't get a fresh dedicated pad i wait till i'm going you know i'm about ready to change this pad out before i do i'm going to run it over the trim and the glass this type of stuff doesn't really care what you use on it if it's clear coat safe it's safe for glass and trim and and you can see it pulled all the oxidation off and brightened up the trim and then when the customer picks up the car not only is the paint glossy the glass is glossy and the trim is really bright so the the whole presentation is boom look how nice my car looks just because you're just so good all right i think that was about it for all the questions out there um i i am bringing this to you because i want you by tomorrow morning to have me 30 different pads done well i'm going to finish buffing out this car and i'm going to try to get it done really fast by just simply going with the bigger pad all right everybody i just want to say thank you for tuning in i know this one ran a little bit longer we're only 15 minutes short of two hours so this was a big topic as you can tell so remember next week we'll be back at three o'clock on tuesday tell your friends tell your buddies make the popcorn get your notes ready and mike do we know what we're doing uh doing next week uh something related to car detailing okay all right everybody stay safe and we see you next time bye y'all see ya you

Channel: Autogeek

Views: 144,658

Keywords: How to detail your car, best detailing products, how to clean cars, Exterior and Interior detailing tricks, how to clean car interior and exterior, interior and exterior car cleaning, car detailing, car cleaning, auto detailing training, car interior exterior cleaning, Auto Detail, Clean your car, Detailing, Automotive care, Paint Care, Fix Car paint, Autogeek, Mike Phillips, car care, fix car paint, car detailing classes, best car detailing class, Detailers of youtube

Id: 1NsbHmY8TCs

Length: 102min 56sec (6176 seconds)

Published: Tue May 12 2020