When to Polish vs Compound vs Wetsand

what's up guys on today's episode we're gonna be talking about Polish compounding and wet-sanding what is the difference between all three of them and when should you use one versus the other this is a perfect example for this video this is a Lexus GS 430 has been absolutely destroyed but more importantly it spin it's been hit with a shovel and when you hit it with a shovel there's long streaks on it you know to remove snow that sort of thing so we're gonna split these up into three pieces I'm gonna show you what polishing does then what compounding does and then what wet sanding doesn't I think at the end of the video you're gonna have a little bit of an appreciation like oh I see when one is used versus the other that sort of thing so today's gonna be a lot of fun that a lot more coming up on this episode of driving protect okay before we get started and actually going through the polishing the wet sanding in the compound ly I think it's important to have a visual idea sort of a concept of what's going on with a scratch and so we're gonna back up a little bit and kind of keep everybody with us so if you're new to scratches this is a piece of paint right and we're gonna look at it from this direction and sort of pretend that the shovel went in this direction okay now what we have is a base primer you know they paint it's usually gray or something and the color in this case it's green and then clear coat on top this is not the scale but it's just for you know a little bit of a analogy here so we have our first deep scratch really really big one and we're gonna talk about the rule of thumb no pun intended is you actually use your thumb and if you can feel the click click and here it typically it's a little too deep but we're gonna go into that in a minute so in this case I feel quickly click click with my thumb it has gone all the way through to the metal now it could be metal aluminum carbon fiber or whatever it is the substrate that it's on the paint and when it's this deep our mission at that point is sort of to decide is what we call detailing dilemma decide how much clear coat which is here how much clear coat are we gonna level without jeopardizing the integrity of the clear coat as you level the clear coat as you polish compound in wet sand as you remove some of that really really thin clear coat you're making it weaker because in that clear coat from the from the factory they put you know UV inhibitors and protection so to speak to protect the color underneath to keep that rich beautiful you know red green blue whatever your color is right so we have to use our judgment how much we're gonna we're gonna take off that and there's varying degrees of scratches which means there's varying degrees of hey we can do that or not it's it's really important as a detailer to say if you see a scratch you can't just say I'm gonna get that scratch out and you know you have to use a bit of judgement so in this particular case here I would say hey we can't get this out it's too deep if I take this all the way down so there's no scratch you're gonna have no paint that's a pretty you know silly example everybody sort of gets out but then you have these medium you know scratches where if I were to take it out right around here right sort of like a cavity if I were to scoop that out now I only have this much clear coat now Detailers have to use their judgment and say hey is this much clear coat from here to here is that minimizing or reducing the integrity or jeopardizing the integrity of the clear coat and at some point it's gonna penetrate the Sun into the color and fade the color so do I want to do that sort of like a doctor you kind of have to really use your judgment when you you're doing these kinds of things and again we're gonna get into in a minute but it's really important understand this concept and then you have small scratches so if you're gonna take a small scratch out here you're just scooping up the cavity and you know when you're removing a little bit of clear coat here and there it's not too bad a mil around you know you're okay and these of course are just polishing scratches you can get that out no sweat those are what I call love marks so to speak when you're when you're wiping with no lubrication so it comes down to I think you're hopefully asking yourself well how do I know how much clear coat is on there well we have these fancy tools called paint depth gauges and what they do is when you put the paint that cage you know Boop on top of the paint here which we're gonna do it measures how much paint is there and we can go over the subtlety in a little bit but basically it measures the whole thing and you have to deduce how much clear coat there is there's fancier tools because these are probably five six seven eight hundred dollars and this one's one or two hundred so they're pretty expensive so it's not very you know weekend warrior friendly so the dilemma again is hey how do I polish the paint if I don't have a paint theft gage and the truth is sort of like hey how do you do surgery without an MRI or an x-ray it's really dangerous that's really you're flying blind it's it's a bit of a risk so I don't know how to mitigate that risk without these special tools you just got to take your time and if you go through it I think you know 80% of time I think you'd be okay but I don't like saying that I'm sure doctor wouldn't say yeah eighty percent of the time the surgery is okay you'd like that that's not really comforting I want a hundred percent and these things give you a hundred percent and I would say for me personally maybe I don't know maybe one out of every two or three hundred cars I go hey I can't do the card what are you talking about get this you don't get the scratch out you do this all day I've measured the paint OOP it makes a beeping noise and it's and it showed me that there's there's this much clear coat there's almost nothing there so if I try to take a scratch out and shrink it down even more there won't be any clear coat so on my conscience I'm not gonna let you ruin the color of your paint be the color of your car because the sun's hitting it and fading I wouldn't do that to you I say hey just live with the scratches because you got a little bit of a jacket on there don't take your jacket off and walk out into the winter you're gonna freeze don't you see that little analogy I'm trying to make there so we have to use a bit of our judgment here when we're when we're doing that so one last piece now on this big scratch which they are there you'll see varying colors as well this color will be more white because it's so deep that when the Sun I put the Sun up here when the Sun shines down it bounces off both sides here and refracts that reflects the light back into your eyes and it's like oh my gosh so a scratch looks like it's white when it's really really deep and these become progressively less white as you get less deep if that makes sense so when we look at the car behind us in a few seconds in a few minutes you'll see there's there's light scratches because a scratch isn't always just the same depth because you can push harder and lighter someone think about you know logically when someone's pushing a brush it's probably gonna be pretty heavy heavy heavy and then lighter as they go further away because they just don't have the pressure pushing downwards so there's gonna be varying degrees and so when you look at this and you test it with your thumb and it's and it's very white that means you've gone all the way through and you're seeing metal down here so there's a lot of moving pieces here I just want to kind of get this out there's we're gonna talk a lot about this at the 88 200 series hopefully coming up soon but you got to understand this concept before we go in in otherwise what I'm going to show you now you're gonna go okay I see what Paula shows okay I see what compounding does oh I see I what wet-sanding does but this is kind of really what's going on inside the paint and keep in mind things like wet sanding which is kind of fun what same thing is actually in some cases less abrasive than compounding because it doesn't have as much the byproduct of heat ooh compounding you're generating a lot of heat which is a negative byproduct of doing that you don't want to generate a whole lot of heat what sanding in some cases is actually less abrasive than compound let's think about that as a little bit of a brain buster let's hop into the paint because we're going to be wet sanding in this video it's helpful and safe to measure the paint beforehand just to have a better picture of how much clear coat or protection is over the color coat as we mentioned earlier to do this use a paint depth gauge on the exterior surface of the vehicle and get a rough average of the mils present then open the driver's side door and place the paint depth gauge on the inner frame of the door and get a rough average of the mils present here as well then do some basic math for your rule of thumb subtract the door frame mill depth from the exterior paint depth to get an idea of how much clear coat you're working with again this is not a hundred percent accurate but it can give you valuable information in under two minutes that could potentially save your but I like to have a minimum of a two to three mil spread available for safety a future sanding cushion maintaining the UV inhibitors and peace of mind before I start cutting the paint now the reason this test can be helpful is that most manufacturers apply a minimum amount of clear coat to the door jambs because they're not regularly exposed to the sun's UV rays because it's behind the door now from a manufacturing perspective you can actually shave expenses by minimizing an amount of clear coat that you put in the door jambs the difference between the two areas can give you an idea how much extra clear they apply to the exterior of the car in this case there's about a three mils difference to work with before you get to the bottom of the clear coat before it hits the color coat okay with upwards of three mils of clear to play with it most likely indicates this paint has never been sanded before so it's gonna be a good demo car for step one of this test notice the long scratch across the hood that's somewhat consistent I'll split the hood into three sections with masking tape the far left for Polish the middle section for compounding and the right section for wet sanding once again take note of the condition of the paint now in all three sections okay so here's what I'm gonna use for the polishing we're gonna be using a yellow foam Rupa's pad with McGuire's 205 for the compounding a McGuire's microfiber cutting pad and M 105 and for wet sanding the Abril on one thousand two thousand and three thousand grit now you may be asking yourself Larry what are you doing with a bunch of knives on here in my infinite analogies I think this is kind of pretty cool so well the way that I think about these different tools again when I say tools I mean just the polishing just the compounding in the wet sanding I like to kind of equate them to something that we use every single day so the first thing is for polishing i quate that to a butter knife right you can grab you can touch it it's really not gonna do a whole lot of damage to yourself but can you do some damage sure of course it's just gonna take you let's say a piece of meat it's gonna take you a long time to cut through a piece of meat right but it's it has it serves its purpose now if we move over to compounding let's use this as a fillet knife for the lack of a better of example so you're trying to cut a you know a piece of fish or what-have-you and fillet it this is a fantastic tool it's very sharp I wouldn't want to go grabbing it that sort of thing and it it cuts through really well now if you move over to here wet sanding I kind of equate that to a steak knife so yeah it's serrated you're really just moving a lot of meat and cutting a lot and and breaking through very quickly so this the the butter knife or the the fillet knife or the mistake knife not one is not better than the other they're just different tools and I think the purpose you know with all my videos especially this one is I can't give you hey step one is this step two is this that three is that maybe on some washing but when it comes to these kind of things that paint really I feel dictates what you need to do so I'm trying to give you what each of these tools represents on the paint and then you whip it out and use it based on your condition of the paint so anyways I hope these analogies are kind of fun we're done with the analogies we're gonna get into the actual polishing and I'll show you the difference because this line going across from the the shovel is pretty consistent so I thought this would be kind of fun the just again it's not gonna be right or wrong just this is what polish does is what compound and what sanding does and I think it's gonna help you out a lot with the roux PEZ yellow pad on the mark to prime your pad thoroughly as always making sure to coat every pore of the phone then add one or two extra dots on speed to I work the product in Section one for roughly thirty seconds or so in Section two I repeat the process with M 105 in a microfiber cutting pad again prime your pad thoroughly especially with microfibers add your dots and repeat on speed two or two-and-a-half for another thirty seconds or so for section three I removed my microfiber cutting pad and switched to the Merkur 1000 grit and used it on the dual action polisher I added a light mist of water sometimes called damp sanding and repeated the steps as we did in section one and two however notice the paint this time is turning white this is 100% normal when sanding the paint next I switched pads and used the 2,000 grit and repeated the same process notice how the finish is becoming less white or more glossy as the grit becomes finer then I finished with 3000 grit wiped clean and let dry now for the results back on section one polishing notice the depth and color difference of the green metallic flakes they seem to be popping much more than before although the paint looks shinier the scratch still remains despite looking a bit better than its original condition in the compound section the scratch is mostly gone except for some very deep areas here however notice the fine lines or the haze left behind again this is 100% normal because the compound is chewing or braiding away at the surface of the clear coat it's doing its job to level the paint surrounding the scratch to remove the defect now the wet sanding side looks whitish which can be concerning if it's your first time sanding but again this is totally normal all the scratches are 100% removed but like compound which is basically just liquid sandpaper it's not very pretty after it levels the paint by the way those white specks you're seeing in the paint are rock chips there's nothing that can be done from an abrasion or wet sanding perspective to remove them you can only touch them up clearly I can't leave the paint looking like this so we have to take it one step further and complete the process the polishing side we're going to leave alone because it's typically the last step in the mechanical abrasion process anyways a compounding section requires a Polish to remove the remaining haze and the wet sanding side needs to be compounded first to remove the 3000 grit sanding marks on a side note in the wet sanding section the compounding became a bit sticky or hard to remove with her microfiber towel because of the excess residue that was clogging the pad and encompassing the abrasive as your work so I blew the pad out a bunch off-camera and added a bit of water to keep it from sticking too much the truth is I needed to work smaller areas or smaller sections with cleaner pads but I think I found a workaround to keep the job moving quickly then I polished section three and wiped clean afterwards I removed the tape lines and sprayed isopropyl alcohol to remove any remaining oils and compared all three sections but please note the ISO spray is not always recommended but for our demonstration purposes I thought it was helpful here to see the results on naked paint okay so we finished up our little experiment here and as you can see on this side the polish what it did was it brought out the metallic green and it looks spectacular and again what we talked about earlier about faking the eye out this green is now popping and it looks really good but we really didn't take the scratch out now the scratch went all the way across right if you remember and right here you can see up close there's still that scratch from the the shovel and it made it better but I wouldn't call it out by any means so polish is really about bringing the depth of the paint out it's not necessarily primarily I should say focused on leveling the paint to bring out or to cut out scratches so then we moved over here and I went to compound first now when we compound we know that it's normal to leave a little bit of a haze behind that's that's typical because the compound is basically chewing or grinding up the paint to level it down that's again this is a rule of thumb and afterwards whenever you compound you have to polish afterwards now in reality the polish like we talked about here I'm sort of alluding to is not really designed to to cut away the paint it's specifically designed to cut away the paint after compounding meaning just just what you know love marks are just barely a little bit of a haze that's left behind so polish is used when you compound to remove the compounding haze that's remaining after it's been cut you with me so if you look closely here again the scratch goes right here it's much much better but you can still see a little bit of the remnants of that initial scratch what I mean by that is when the scratch occurs like we talked about on that board I basically what the compound rounded the edges out so it's a little duller to the eye but if you look and you put your light in there you can actually I put a piece of tape here before to show you because it's very hard to catch on camera this is all subtleties you can still see a little bit of the crater that's left behind because the compound just didn't get low enough or I didn't spend enough time with it or didn't put enough pressure that kind of thing now if we slide all the way over here again the scratch went like this it's 1,000 2,000 3,000 then microfiber cutting pad with compound then polish I went through all the steps here now this as far as I'm concerned is a piece of glass aside from the rock chips and what-have-you and if you remember on this side you know if I was a forensic you know person for detailing I would bet you a million dollars my buddy came from this side and used the scraper this direction because it was a little bit heavier here and then went a bit lighter now if you think about that lighter you would think the Polish would have a better chance at it but it even didn't it didn't even get that the light stuff out the heavy stuff I I specifically did wet sanding over here because it was so heavy and white that I didn't think it was going to be able to get out at all but though as you can see it's completely gone piece of glass so if we take my paint up gauge so if I go over here so five point five five point three right it's getting less four point six so you can see I've taken off progressively more and more paint as I became more or more more and more aggressive and as I took down more paint that scratched that was right here right all the way across kind of like this looking at it from this direction with the Polish I took it down like that alright with the compound I took it down like that with the wet sanding I took it down so now it's perfectly flat and this is as far as I'm concerned showcar quality of perfection do you need to do this no the weather this worked or not is not the point of the video it's just to understand the limitations and and what each particular tool that you have in your arsenal can do and just utilizing that tool to effectively work on the pain so anyways I hope that was helpful I actually have to do the rest of this car and I'm gonna pick and choose probably a lot of the scratches on the back I may just go at it with wet sanding because sometimes wet sanding is just much faster although it's multiple steps I don't have to sit here and heat up the paint with compounding that's what I was alluding to before I'm just grinding and grinding that's gonna you know make the paint much hotter and softer and the funky things can go on there what I'm doing here I have water it's lubricating it's keeping the temperature down so I'm just looking to grind these things out do you see what's going on here so there's no way for me to say every every part of this paint I'm going to compound every part of this pain I'm gonna wet sand or repaint I'm gonna polish polish is kind of a prerequisite if you do any of these over here you have to polish but you can see there's no cookie cutter way to do it anyways hope this was somewhat helpful this car is completely trashed and I have a couple of hours to get it done for a buddy of mine yeah as always if you have any questions shoot me an email Larry at amo NYC comm thanks for watching we'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: AMMO NYC

Views: 3,037,544

Rating: 4.8719058 out of 5

Keywords: Scratch removal, Top Detailing Tips, Larry Kosilla Detailing, AMMO Detailing Products, AMMO Products, AMMO Detailing, How to remove a scratch, AMMOnyc, AMMO Car Care Products, When to polish vs compound vs wetsand, How to wet sand your paint, How to compound your car, How to remove scratches from paint, How to measure your paint depth, Larry Kosilla detailing training, Rupes Polisher, Mirka Sanding Discs, Meguiars M105, Meguiars M205, auto detailing, how to polish a car

Id: cHEpqYGuUHI

Length: 19min 8sec (1148 seconds)

Published: Wed May 02 2018