I was gonna say... swirl free by hand? C'mon... if thats the case I'm wasting hours and hours of my time correcting paint by machine LOL

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At some point when do you worry that the clear coat is gone?
Thats the part i cant wrap my head around.
I have been thinking after the 2 year mark maybe get another clear coat on my car if at all possible.

Ask Dylan here.. He's a pro :)

Nah it's my daily driver. He was just washing it.

From my online research polishing a z with a pc doesn't remove very much clearcoat. You can polish once a year for probably 10 years and still have clear Coat left. The results are much better than zainoing by hand.

I dout any thing beats a perfect surface. But zaino still has its uses hehe.

Correct. Thats part of what makes a PC a safe method for the DO IT YOURSELF/WEEKEND WARRIOR as well as the professionals. There are hacks out there that will take a rotary and wool pad to the most minor imperfections and cut right thru the clear. Its like using a bazooka to swat house flies, why go to that extreme? Never makes sense to remove lots of clear, when just removing a little will fix the problem.

Paint is measured in terms of mils, and average factory clear is going to range from 4 to 8 mils thick... if you use a good paint gauge your measurement will be in microns. 1000 microns = 1 mil... so a clear coat paint job should have somewhere between 4000 - 8000 microns of depth.

That being said a single pass of our swirl & haze remover with an orange pad will remove approximately 2-5 microns of clear, follow that with our Fine Machine Polish and you're looking at less than 1 more micron coming off, but we'll round up for the sake of argument.

So in a worst case scenario you'd be pulling off 6 microns of clear doing a 2 stage polish, one pass each, of our products. Leaving you with (even if you had thin clear coat) 3,994 microns of clear... at that rate you would have to do over 600 treatments of both SHR and FMP to get to an area of concern even on a THIN paint job.

Now of course this only takes into consideration a 'virgin' paintjob. If you're unfamiliar with the cars history or have extensive repair work done (ie - sanding or rotary buffing) you would have to consider these numbers differently. Your average "bad wash" swirl marks are going to be only a few microns deep so to level the clear and rid the surface of swirl marks will take only a few polishing passes in most cases. Also consider that if you use good wash habits, minimize the chances for new damage to occur, and thus limit the amount of swirls you should only need to polish a few times a year.

I'd say on my personal vehicles I average 2 complete corrections a year, usually less, with a couple of spot corrections for intermittent damage mixed in.

Long story short, polishing with a porter cable isn't ever going to be a concern for MOST people as long as the paints condition is 'factory' when you start. Most people won't own a car long enough to even worry about it in the first place. Think I read recently that the average ownership cycle for most americans is down to around 6 years now.

This is why I tell people that a full paint correction is a one time event. You should NOT have to keep using abrasive products like SHR, ZPC or M105. If you properly care for your paint, products like Adam's Fine Machine Polish, M#9 and M205 are all you'll ever need after the initial paint correction process. If you are continuing to use the more abrasive products then you are totally caring for your paint incorrectly. This is why I wash and dry my car the way I do.

It's about being proactive, not reactive.

AJ makes an excellent point... an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of pain (or paint in this case)

Some where along the line i have messed up because i have angel hair or very very very fine scratches. Then again my car is daily driven and i cant protect from every thing. And alot of them was there before i recieved the car also.

If i were to purchase a porter cable what is the best for a novice?
Something simple and easy and hard to mess up and preferably cheap.

I was watching the adams videos and they used a drill with a pad.

Simple, cheap and easy does NOT include the Porter-Cable. That's what OTC products are for. I can still get you easy, but cheap is relative to how much money you make a year. To me, the cost involved in making my car bling is minimal for the return I get. The fact that I sometimes walk around my car in the garage looking at it all times of the day and night means that it is very appealing to my eyes. A lot of that has to do with the shine.

http://www.pc-surgeon.net/images/cforum/washpics0.jpg

Now if you want to know how simple the initial correction process is, watch these videos. The tiny micro-scratches that you will pick up here and there AFTER the initial paint correction can be resolved with the Fine Machine Polish that you'll see me talking about in the videos. That polish is very light and you can use it with the Porter-Cable until the cows come home.

That pad kit also comes with the necessary attachments to attch those pads to the PC. That is the way I use my 4" pads. :tup:

Hard to say specifically b/c everyones definition of very minor defects is going to vary. What might be minor to you, might be major to someone else.

Assuming all things are relative and you want to have all the right products to do a number of levels of correction the complete DA kit would be the way to go:

Adam's Complete Dual-Action Car Polisher Kit

Another option would be to simply pick up the White Pad, Fine machine polish, some towels and detail spray then just look for the PC elsewhere by itself... again though thats not going to give you a whole lot of correcting ability as its mainly a finishing/final polishing step.

Either route you're gonna want to start with clay obviously.

The focus pads on the drill are really only intended for spot correction and headlight restoration. Because it functions like a rotary YOU WILL HAVE HOLORGRAMS after using that setup so its not the route to go for correcting swirls over the entire surface of your car.

I washed my dads car for him today and pointed out all the swirl marks etc to him and was explaining how they were all caused by going to car washes etc. and then i said 'if you are ever driving my car somewhere, don't try and do me a favor by taking it to a car wash for me.

:rofl2::rofl2: