When a car is taken for car care, the key to achieving good results is to properly prepare the car for whatever procedure that it needs to go through. For a car painting job to come out looking well finished, enough care needs o be taken in the steps leading to the covering of the car with paint. Most often there will be two steps involved. The first step that is included in the car repair will be to remove any bonded contaminants to expose the painted surface. The second one is to polish the car to remove subsurface defects.



The polishing step of the car involves all process that is used to mask any pain defects on the car. Polishing is often wrongly quoted by car detailers or car mechanic who may use it to mean any of the processes that they use on the car to make it shine. However while they may claim that they have done a polishing job on the car at auto shop, most car owners end up being dissatisfied with the work that is done. This is because most times, these detailers don not fully understand what polishing is all about. Polishing are different processes that the body of the car will go through in order to remove paint defects in preparation for paint protection. In this article we look at some paint defects, which defects can be polished at auto repair center and how to correct defects using polishing.

Paint defects

The most obvious defects on cars are scratches and stone chips. However, it is not very clear what causes swirl marks as well as other kind of the water spots. The most likely cause of swirl marks is from washing the car automatically or manually. The seemingly soft brushes of automatic machines are not that soft and may leave very fine scratch marks on the car. Unlike the popular idea about that swirl marks are caused by washing in circles, they are not. They are caused by the pattern on of reflection of light that falls on the car. Water spots form when water from the tap is used to rinse a car and the car is left to air dry.

Correcting defects with polishing

 Before we move on to talk about polishing done by the auto mechanic, it is important to note that it is not all types of paint defects that can be removed by polishing. Most painting is includes a base coat, a middle coat and a top coat or clear coat. Usually the top coat is very thick so that it protects the underlying coats and car surface. Polishing will work well for those defects that do not go below the clear coat. Defects on the clear coat can be corrected by polishing the top coat aggressively before applying any form of protection. Another way is to polish gently and the hiding the defect using wax.