How To Polish A Car For Beginners || Remove Swirls and Scratches || Car Polish

Welcome back to Stauffer Garage, guys! In today's video, I'm going to be showing you how to remove any swirl marks or light scratching on your car's paint.

So the first step is to make sure you have your car washed. Your car is clean of any contaminants or dirt, and then what we're going to do is we are going to clay the surface here. I'm spraying a soapy water, which is just actually Dawn dish detergent, probably three or four drops in a full bottle of water, and we're using that more as a lubricant to slide the clay back and forth across.

Now, if you've never heard of clay barring, clay bar is not actual real clay like you would think it is. It is a specific type of material, but what it essentially does is it's a moldable piece of putty that you slide across the surface of your paint to remove any contaminants or dirt that is clinging to the surface. I'm going to be showing you here in a second how dirty this clay bar is.

But you're using essentially light pressure to let the bar slide across the surface, and when you hit a contaminant or any sort of particle on the paint surface, you'll feel the bar drag a little bit. You'll kind of slide it back and forth across that area until it goes away. That is a really crude way of explaining it, but it's essentially just trying to remove anything on the surface before you polish.

You're not scratching the paint more. Here is the bar after just doing half the hood; you can see how dark it is. What you'll want to do is then just fold and knead the bar over, and essentially you're locking in all that contaminant and dirt inside the bar, revealing a fresh, clean surface to continue doing the rest of your hood.

Now the whole hood is done being clayed. Usually, you'll want to go across the whole car. For this video, I'm just kind of doing a demo of the hood itself. But once you're done cleaning, I'm just using a quick detail spray to spray the surface before I dry it off to kind of clean any of that soapy water and any dirt that might have been left on the surface off before we polish.

Now, with the surface completely dried off and ready to go, we are going to begin machine polishing. Today, I'm going to be using a DA polisher. It's a dual-action orbital polisher. The polisher that I have is from Harbor Freight, so it is a budget-friendly, economical option for people.

I will say though that I'm going to be doing a video soon where I'm going to be comparing it to a RUPES 15-millimeter throw polisher, which I am super, super excited about because that is supposed to be the king of polishers from a dual-action standpoint. I'm really excited to use it, but today I'm using a gray polishing pad with a one-step type polished product.

There are tons of different polish types out there. I'll leave all the products that I use in the description box below if you're interested, but you know, kind of do your research, figure out what polish works best for you. This is a polish that I've been using for a little while now. I've been trying out several different types, but this is a good one-step type polish, if you will, that allows you to clean the surface, remove a lot of the swirl marks, but it's not super, super aggressive.

Now, when you begin polishing, usually put about dime-sized circles of polish onto your pad. I usually put about seven or eight, and usually spray the surface of the pad one time with a quick detail spray because the pad is new, the pad is fresh, I haven't used it yet, and it hasn't soaked up any of that polish. After doing a large part of the car that way, I just feel that there's a little bit of extra lubricity on the surface before I throw it on the paint.

Now, for a dual-action polisher, I usually kind of dab the pad around on the paint to kind of spread the polish onto the surface because if you turn it on full blast right away, what will happen is you'll fling it everywhere, and we don't want that. That just gives you extra work. So usually start off at a speed one or two, and then for this type of polisher, I'm cranking it up to about a five or six speed, which is about relatively comparable to any other orbital polisher in terms of speed.

Now one thing to remember with a DA polisher, orbital polisher, you can't really burn your paint. I'm sure there are types and examples where you can, but for the most part, moving it slowly back and forth in a uniform pattern, overlapping with your previous pass, you'll be able to remove most swirl marks pretty easily, but just not as quickly as if you had a circular polisher.

For the most part, with the orbital polisher, for anybody that's doing this as a weekend hobby, it's a great option, including this Harbor Freight example, which you can pick up for fairly cheap. When you're doing your polishing, make sure you're doing enough of the pass and you're going slow enough to break down the polish itself. The polish itself is supposed to dry up; it's supposed to become chalky, it's supposed to do the work for you.

In this example here, I'm actually figuring out that the amount of polish I used was just a little too much because, when I was drying it, you could see some of the streaking of the polish; it wasn't coming off super, super easily. Now, with any flashlight, you can typically see there are certain detailing flashlights that pull and show better the different scratches and swirl marks.

Here, you can see just after one pass how big of a change I was able to accomplish with this polish and this orbital polisher. Now, I'm going to be performing a second pass on the same surface area, and once again cranking up the speed to six or seven and slowly moving the polisher back and forth, doing horizontal and vertical passes to break down the polish.

So this is a one-step polish which I've enjoyed using so far, but I have used different polishes in the past, especially Poor Boy's SSR 1, 2, and 2.5 that I've enjoyed a lot more, so I'm not completely sold on the polish that I'm using in this video. So, if you do have recommendations for a one-step polish, kind of like the Sonax Perfect Finish, that is kind of one that I'm looking forward to trying here soon.

So if you have any product recommendations, please let me know in the comments below. The good thing about orbital polishers, especially on cars with a lot of curves or edges on them, like my hood here, you can see the different raised surfaces. An orbital polisher really can't burn through the paint in those different high spots, whereas a circular polisher, you have to be really, really careful with that, and you have to be a really good detailer and know what you're doing.

But with an orbital polisher kind of coming up on those edges eliminates some of the risk and concern of damaging the paint excessively. Always be careful and always keep the polisher moving, but with an orbital, you do minimize the amount of heat buildup compared to a circular polisher.

I highly recommend gloves, and I highly recommend that if you are working in an enclosed space, you know, maybe wear a respirator as well, just for the long-term health benefits. Now the amount of pressure that you typically want to apply with a polisher is very minimal, so in the orbital here, this polisher itself, I'm not super, super happy with.

It does have some imbalances, it does need a little bit more extra control and firmness when holding it compared to some other nicer polishers out there, but this one in particular does a pretty good job. It just requires some extra hand control and firmness going over some curved areas to make sure it doesn't jump around.

I think one of my favorite things about polishing a car is actually putting that tape line down the center of a panel and polishing one side and then removing the tape to reveal the difference between what you've polished and what you haven't. I think that's one of the most rewarding parts of the whole experience because then you can truly see how much work you've done and how well it's turned out.

I do recommend that after you're done polishing, just kind of top it off with a quick detail spray. What it kind of does is lifts any of the oily residue from polishing off of the paint before you do any last step products.

Now for the reveal. So once I remove my tape, I do need to use the quick detail spray again just from the residue that was left over underneath the tape edges. The transformation, just with doing one light pass, and I will say that this is not a perfect polished deep job, but you can quickly see with about 30 minutes of polishing how much swirl marking and damage I removed from the paint and leveled out.

So here's the line; here's the right side being the polished side, and the left side being the unpolished side. It is a drastic difference in just doing one pass with the orbital polisher, and here is the after. I am just following up with a quick detail spray of what the paint job looks like just with a polish on the hood. This is no product put on top, no wax, no sealant, no nothing, but you can see the mirror-like finish that was obtained just by doing one pass with an orbital polisher and one-step final polish.

So if you guys liked today's video, make sure you give it a thumbs up. I am going to be doing a full exterior detail on this car, and I'm also going to be trying out the new McGuire's Hybrid Ceramic Sealant. I've actually tried it on a different car that I haven't videoed yet, and I am super pleased with the results of it so far.

So if you guys want to see that, let me know in the comments below or any other videos you want to see next, and make sure you hit that subscribe button so you don't miss out on new videos. I'll see you guys next time!