The main question is about auto-polishing. I want to polish my car and i was wondering if those electric auto polishers are any good. So far i only seen a few of them but i'm afraid they will make it even worse. I've also heard that if you don't do it properly or use too much force or incline it slightly it will make it even worse and cause even bigger swirl marks. I want to polish the whole car just to cover the swirl marks, and polish with some abrasive paste (some parts manually) and then wax the whole car. So what is you opinion about those things? If you aprove them any links to some good ones? Or what should i look for?

 

Oh come on people i know you can...

 

having a great amount of experience with this and great paint/body shop friends in my neighborhood I tell you this:

DO NOT GET THE electric polisher and do not polish the car with the automatic one yourself at all.....

it is very easy to damage the paint, especially as soft and thin layer as bmw has.....
especially using abrasive!!! no way doing it on your own.... not that it is so difficult but it is very sensitive and one better have a lot of experience and not learning on brand new BMW

have a professional do it for you..... they have professional lines of products such as 3M polishes you can't buy in any store and their electric polishers are a different league from what you can buy at your local car store

it is very easy to damage the paint.... to grind some spots of compeletely, especialy on the edges of the car!

the only think I do to my car is to wax it myself.... using soft cloth and carnauba wax.... and still going very easy..... the top transparent layer of paint is so soft and sensitive like crazy

 

Gotch ya man! Thanks for the advice.
I have only one more little question: how do you wax it? Apply a thin layer of carnauba wax on the cloth and start gently rubbing small areas with a circual movement? Do you let it stay for a minute or so after you applied it or you rub it till it's all gone and shiny?
A small waxing/polishing tutorial would be great. Thanx!

 

about waxing....
first nice wash and then nice drying using pure leather made for this reason

then I apply layer of wax using a sponge first.
like a kitchen sponge for washing dishes.... but the soft side of course...... the sponge is good for applying the layer of wax....
I apply layer of wax all over the car.... so the car is almost white
I do apply the wax all over the car first so YES I let the wax to sit a little before I polish it off......

then I softly polish doing circular movements using a very fine and soft piece of clothe....

 

Thanks for the info. Oh and btw did you ever use solid wax? How is that better (if) than normal liquid wax?

 

I use only liquid wax with Carnauba.... so can't tell much about solid wax.
I think the good part about liquid wax is that you can easily and evenly spread it all over the car

 

There are a two types of machine polishers, and one of them has the potential to do great harm in inexperienced hands: the rotary buffer. A rotary buffer spins like a sander and generates a lot of surface heat - so, yes, you could burn right through the clear coat into the color paint in a hurry if you don't know what you are doing.

The other kind - random orbital polishers - are nearly fool-proof to use as they sort of vibrate in a random-offset fashion while they spin around. The Porter Cable 7424 6" orbital polisher is the choice of many experienced users.

I recently purchased Griot's Garage Random Orbital and tried it out for the first time yesterday (on the Mrs.' Volvo hood). I found it easy to use and the results are excellent. It took out minor swirl marks and brought the shine back to new (and this was a surface that had no treatments in 3 years). Although, I need to try a rougher polish grade to get out more severe surface scratches.

The orbital is loud (need ear plugs) and a bit of a load to handle, but it is much quicker and easier on your muscles than polishing by hand.

After some more practice (on the Mrs.' car -hehehe), I expect to polish up the 550 with it.

 

Nice strategy. I kinda used a too abrasive polish, you could feel how sandy it was, and it kinda destroyed the shine on a surface, and caused some bigger swirl marks, had to repolish it with a way less abrasive polish, and then after a few treatments, wax it good, and still you can see the damage. That's what you get for being stupid.

 

The are two polishers that are generally mentioned as the best. They are Porter Cable (Griot's is a rebranded Porter Cable) and Cylco.

The Cylo is "idiot-proof". I worked in a high end detail shop in my college days and we used nothing but the Cylco and just started using one again. I forgot how great these things are.

I ordered mine here:
http://www.topoftheline.com/cyclo-polisher.html

You may need the 230 Volt version. The also make it in Pneumatic. Here is Clyclo's line up:

http://www.cyclotoolmakers.com/cyclopolish...opolishers.html