While professional detailers make it look easy in their videos, polishing a car involves plenty of skill, not just work. The bad news in all this is that skill has a part that is called experience, and that experience involves mistakes. Now, thanks to expert Larry Kosilla, we get to see a glimpse of what can go wrong while polishing without affecting a customer's vehicle.
As you may be aware, you can wax your car manually or with an electric machine, usually referred to as a polishing machine, and the latter come in various shapes and sizes.
Various kinds of machines can be used for detailing, but even buying one of the best on the market does not guarantee perfect results. While polishing manually is also a possibility, it takes too much effort to even consider bringing it into the equation.
Now, you may be inclined to think that the polishing pad or compound used have a difference in the process, and they do, but neither can stop negligence from leading to failure. In the world of detailing, failure can mean a lot of things, but in this case, we are writing about destroying paint because of too much polishing.
When applied from the factory, a vehicle's paint will have a certain thickness, which should be uniform across the board. Every time the vehicle is polished, it may lose a bit of that layer, but it gains shine, as well as a better look. This is all in theory, as failed detailing may leave you with worse paint than what you had when you started.
Repeated polishing operations in a brief period may lead to paint damage, but only if both detailers fail, or if the first one has done so much damage that things may not be undone.
These are all things that you need to consider before taking your vehicle to a novice detailer that you found online. While their intentions may be good, and some of the few reviews they received may be positive, the potential of them making a mistake is higher than with an experienced professional.
As I once read on a plumber's van: "If you think a professional is expensive, wait until you ask an amateur to do the job instead!" It is painfully true, as you still have to get a professional to get the job done, as well as fix what was broken – if possible, and you are the one paying for it all.
In Larry's test below, he intentionally exceeds all reasonable intents and purposes for the sake of science, and it is done on the hood of a totaled Toyota Corolla that was headed to the junkyard anyway.
This is an excellent learning opportunity if you ever intend to do a bit of detailing work on your vehicles, and Larry is once again masterful at explaining what, how, and why can go wrong with this kind of work.
As you will observe in the video, the worst kind of damage can be done by holding the pad on the surface of the paint while ignoring all the tell-tale signs of inevitable damage. Putting pressure on the polishing pad makes it worse, and some of these mistakes might be made by a novice detailer on their first vehicles, if you ask us.
Sebastian's love for cars began at a young age. Little did he know that a career would emerge from this passion (and that it would not, sadly, involve being a professional racecar driver). In over fourteen years, he got behind the wheel of several hundred vehicles and in the offices of the most important car publications in his homeland. Full profile
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