Polishing with a DA polisher issue

Also...any chance I may need to use a stronger cutting compound first? I cant imagine I would need it on a 4 week old car thats been washed twice.
 
brunoranger said:
Also...any chance I may need to use a stronger cutting compound first? I cant imagine I would need it on a 4 week old car thats been washed twice.
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Since Tesla paint is reported to be very soft, my vote would be, "no". With soft paint you will be really suprised how much can be corrected with a finishing polish and the right pad. I have removed heavy dealer wash installed marring on a Toyota and polished away years of neglect on a Honda with only white LC pads and a quality polish. The right products put together should serve you well. Someone also mentioned good buffing towels. That's a great point. You don't want to put more marring into the paint while buffing off the polish!

Also, since the car is new and the paint is soft, the last thing you really want to do is start polishing away more of your clear coat than is needed by using a heavy compound.
 
brunoranger said:
Thanks for the advice. So should I ditch my Torqx DA for this particular car and do it by hand then? Or try it again with the DA with the Menzerna and/or new pads.
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before you give up on your polisher... try this.

Do one pass (left to right or up and down) with your polisher and liquid. Use moderate ( about an inch per sec ) hand speed and moderate (the weight of your hand resting on the machine) pressure. examine the area with a good light and see what effect it had on the paint. if you see improvement but still fell short of your expectation then do a second pass. examine the area to see if the result is close to what you had in mind. Generally, I get what I am looking for in 2-3 passes.

If the second or 3 pass does the trick then you know how many passes you need to make on the rest of the car.

This is where experience comes in.... After every pass, think about what I said on my previous post and try to make adjustments (hand speed, pressure, work area size, aggressiveness of the liquid & pad combo ) for the next pass. See if that makes any difference. If it does... you just home in on your process.

one more word of advise... working with diminishing polish and SMAT polish takes different approach. I am not familiar with M210 so I am not sure what advise to give you. maybe someone will chime in.
 
Desertnate said:
Also, since the car is new and the paint is soft, the last thing you really want to do is start polishing away more of your clear coat than is needed by using a heavy compound.
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this is a great point. use the least aggressive approach to get the job done. I recently worked on a vintage 1995 porsche 911 (993). I did a 2 step correction and I absolutely dont want to take too much paint off. the car had a single stage paint system and it measured 180 microns average. after the correction and final polish it was down to around 175. I took very little off. I really had to make sure my approach was in line to my goal for this vehicle. Using the method I listed on my earlier post helped a lot.
 
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