I bought a Sonus SFX polishing kit (son-sfx-pol-kit) for my birthday, which comes with a Porter Cable 7424 random orbit polisher, pads, bonnets and paint cleaner. I also ordered their SFX1 (restoring), SFX2 (enhancing) and SFX3 (final finish) polishes to start learning with. I finally got motivated enough this morning to break it open and try it out.
The Marauder's paint is in serious need of some TLC, but since I've never used a machine polisher before I tried it out on the wife's '01 Escape.
The Escape has never seen much better than a automatic car wash in 6 years and has some serious pitting on the hood and light to moderate scratches all over. Polishing it's paint is sorta like trying to make a silk purse out of a pig's ear, but I figured experimenting on it is better than turning my unexperienced hand on the Marauder first.
Anyway, I got to polishing the hood with the following steps:
1. Zaino Z-7 car wash
2. Zaino Z-18 claybar
3. Sonus SFX1 restore polish
4. Sonus SFX2 enhancing polish
5. Sonus SFX3 finishing polish
6. Zaino Z2 show car polish
In all of the SFX polishing steps I tried to use the polishing technique detailed in this video:
Below is a progression of the efforts on the Escape:
The hood has quite a bit of pitting, but polishing out the scratches was what I was mainly concerned about and they came right up by the time I completed step 5. I only slapped on one coat of the Zaino protection polish just to get something on it while I got to the rest of the vehicle.
I was really curious to see an up-close progression so I tried copying the same reflection in all the pictures above into one picture:
Some observations during the process:
- I tried being conservative by going right to the SFX2 enhancer but it didn't effect the scratches at all.
- The polishers didn't break down becoming clear like as shown on some of the polishing how-to videos I've watched. Once it was worked for more than a couple minutes it would start to dust up around the borders of the work area. It seemed that it did so much after a couple of minutes (about 10-12 interlacing passes total) and working it any more gained little or nothing so I stopped short of it dusting up.
- The Porter Cable was a bit unstable at 6 but 5-1/2 worked great working on the polish.
- The Sonus also kit came with a free bottle of paint cleaner which I guess I should have used prior to applying the Zaino polish. I'll try it on the sides when I get back to work on the Escape.
All in all I'm pretty impressed by what I was able to do with the polisher considering the condition of the paint to begin with and my total lack of experience using a machine polisher. Even with all the pitting the hood looks a hundred times better than it did. There's still some etching from bird droppings that didn't come out entirely though. Now that I've started it I'm going to have to finish off the Escape before tackling the Marauder. I'll post some more pics after I get the Escape finished up.
The Marauder's paint is in serious need of some TLC, but since I've never used a machine polisher before I tried it out on the wife's '01 Escape.
The Escape has never seen much better than a automatic car wash in 6 years and has some serious pitting on the hood and light to moderate scratches all over. Polishing it's paint is sorta like trying to make a silk purse out of a pig's ear, but I figured experimenting on it is better than turning my unexperienced hand on the Marauder first.
Anyway, I got to polishing the hood with the following steps:
1. Zaino Z-7 car wash
2. Zaino Z-18 claybar
3. Sonus SFX1 restore polish
4. Sonus SFX2 enhancing polish
5. Sonus SFX3 finishing polish
6. Zaino Z2 show car polish
In all of the SFX polishing steps I tried to use the polishing technique detailed in this video:
Below is a progression of the efforts on the Escape:
The hood has quite a bit of pitting, but polishing out the scratches was what I was mainly concerned about and they came right up by the time I completed step 5. I only slapped on one coat of the Zaino protection polish just to get something on it while I got to the rest of the vehicle.
I was really curious to see an up-close progression so I tried copying the same reflection in all the pictures above into one picture:
Some observations during the process:
- I tried being conservative by going right to the SFX2 enhancer but it didn't effect the scratches at all.
- The polishers didn't break down becoming clear like as shown on some of the polishing how-to videos I've watched. Once it was worked for more than a couple minutes it would start to dust up around the borders of the work area. It seemed that it did so much after a couple of minutes (about 10-12 interlacing passes total) and working it any more gained little or nothing so I stopped short of it dusting up.
- The Porter Cable was a bit unstable at 6 but 5-1/2 worked great working on the polish.
- The Sonus also kit came with a free bottle of paint cleaner which I guess I should have used prior to applying the Zaino polish. I'll try it on the sides when I get back to work on the Escape.
All in all I'm pretty impressed by what I was able to do with the polisher considering the condition of the paint to begin with and my total lack of experience using a machine polisher. Even with all the pitting the hood looks a hundred times better than it did. There's still some etching from bird droppings that didn't come out entirely though. Now that I've started it I'm going to have to finish off the Escape before tackling the Marauder. I'll post some more pics after I get the Escape finished up.
Comment