Was it the thin 5.5" pad or the thick 6.5" pad?
It's just thin pads rotate better than thick large pads on tools like these and in order to REMOVE PAINT the pad MUST ROTATE. That's a fact.
The way you remove ANY below surface defect is to remove enough paint off the surface to level the surface with the lowest depth of the defects you're trying to remove.
Thus removing defects means removing paint and this is why it's so HARD to remove swirls and scratches or any type of below surface defect by hand and that's because back in the 1980's the paints changed and we went from single stage paints (soft except white), to basecoat/clearcoat paints which are basically no longer paint but a type of hard, clear plastic.
Here's what you need to do....
Video: Mark your backing plate to make it easy to see pad rotation
Here's a quick video that show how and why to mark your backing plate to see and monitor pad rotation while doing any correction or polishing steps.
Exactly. I would call it
FIRM pressure instead of medium pressure but do make sure the pad is rotating.
This video is from
2009, pretty much any other video showing this is a
copy of this because I wrote the definition for the term "Section Pass". As well as made the first video showing how to make section passes. No one ever gives due credit in the online world though everyone just copies and regurgitates.
First here's the definition of a section pass.
And watch this 6 year old video...