Why should I polish my car?
Polishing, also known as paint correction, is one of the most important steps in car detailing that arguably requires the greatest amount of care. Why? The polishing process requires an incredible amount of patience since it's really easy to make a mistake.
Polishing is the process of getting rid of the imperfections on your car body’s surface and restoring it to a better condition. These imperfections typically manifest themselves in fine scratches and if left untreated these scratches will negatively affect the quality of your car body paint. While polishing your car does indeed improve its overall aesthetic, there’s a more important reason for doing so. Every car has what’s called a clear coat, otherwise known as the paint’s protective layer. Think of it as the armor a knight would wear when they go into battle.
When your car’s clear coat gets damaged, it makes it more susceptible for dirt, dust, and debris to embed itself deeper into the surface. This will eventually lead to bigger problems for your car body that will be clearly visible to any car owner such as chipping, color fading, and sun damage. Much like how a knight wouldn’t want cracks in their armor, lest they get damaged in the heat of battle. Polishing maintains and extends the life of your clear coat by cleaning it to the point where it looks shiny new.
So now that you know why you need to polish your car, let’s break down our process for how we’ll polish your car.
Unfortunately, since no one car is made equal there is no one-size-fits-all method for car polishing. This is actually a blessing in disguise, since it requires a level of detail that your car deserves and really only an experienced professional can deliver. Like we said earlier, polishing is an area of car detailing that is really easy to make a mistake and if you do it yourself (or even worse leave it to an amateur) can cause irreversible damage and can cost you a lot of money.
Before we start polishing your car, we have to lay down the groundwork for it first. The first step of our prepwork for polishing is washing and drying your car body and then following it up with a clay bar treatment. This removes any dirt and debris on the surface of the car. Afterwards, we use an iron remover spray to get rid of the iron particles that can be trapped in the clear coat. This decreases the potential for damage when we polish your car.
The second step of our prepwork for polishing is leveling, also known as phase paint correction. This is used to remove the surface level scratches on your car’s clear coat. To do this, we use a microfiber cutting pad that’s attached to an electric polisher. We apply a cutting compound to our polisher and go to work on your car body. Every six square feet we’ll replace the microfiber cutting pad since we don’t want to damage the clear coat by creating a larger hole into it. We then repeat this process for the entire car before we start polishing.
After we’re done leveling, your car will appear smooth and scratch-free but will have a dull-looking finish. Finally, this is where we start polishing and where we’ll restore your car to a shiny new state! For this process, we start with a brand-new polishing pad and disk to make sure that we’re not spreading any extra residue across your car’s clear coat. We then add a refined polishing compound to the pad which acts as a lubricant when we polish the clear coat. Afterwards, we apply the polish in a pattern that follows your car’s body lines. Throughout the process, we pay attention to the pads we’re using and change them when necessary. We don’t stop until every panel of your car has been polished and depending on the amount of leveling that was needed for your car, we typically apply two to three additional polish coats.
After we put on the last coat, we’ve finished polishing and we guarantee that it’ll look even better when you first obtained your car!
