I thought about doing a wright up when I learned how to polish my truck, but I thought no one cared. I have received a few requests on doing a right up on it so here it is!

My buddy is a body guy and this is how the professionals polish paint!

***CAUTION IF YOU DO MESS THIS UP YOU CAN RECK YOUR PAINT!!!*****

First thing first is you can mess up your paint but it is pretty hard to do. To burn the paint you would have to keep going over the same spot over and over again with the buffer on high speed! You will be able to feel the paint heating up if you touch it and if it is getting hot just leave that area alone until it cools down.

Now you need a high speed polisher. This is not my profession so I went to harbor Freight and bought a cheap one, this will get the job done but it sucks. I have all snap on tools and bosh electric tools so I normal do not buy junk tools but I did not have an extra 200 dollars to spend on a one use tool that I am only going to use a few times.

This is the one that I bought



This is one of the really nice ones



I have used some of the nicer ones and it is amazing to use, but I can deal with the cheap one!

Moving on, now you need the polishing pads. There is two kind of pads you can use. The first pad is a wool pad and the second one is a foam waffle pad. the foam waffle pads have differnt polishing grades like fine and ultra fine, so on.

this is a wool pad



This is the foam waffle pad



The different color pad are the different grades of polishing.

Now for the actual polish this is obviously very important! I prefer the 3m line because that is what I know works! It is a 3 step proses, really 4 because I put a really good coat of wax on it when I am done. This is the expensive part, so buy them on line and save a bunch of money!



You will notice that the different number on the bottles have different color caps and the foam pads color match up with the colors of the caps for the right polish grade to use with each one!

A few more things that you need is tape and paper. MAKE SURE YOU USE AUTOMOTIVE REFINISHING TAPE! I like the thin one because you cover ever crack on your truck so this covers less area.

This is the tape that I use




You will go through at least 2 probably 3 rolls of this tape so I would buy at least 4 rolls.

Now you are still not ready to start polishing!

You need to make sure you are not in the sun because it will bake this stuff on, not because it make swirls, the swirls come from you pushing on one side of the pad while you are polishing. When you are polishing you have to try to keep the pad as flat as you can!

First thing first make sure you wash the truck first! MAKE SURE THERE IS NO DIRT ANY WHERE. If dirt gets in the pad or on the truck it will destroy you truck! So make sure you are watching what yo do!

Now you need to start taping off every crack on the truck because this will get EVERYWHERE and you can not get it out of the cracks and it will make the cracks white and look like crap! Normal they cover the windows too with paper and I cover the wheels too because it will stain the rubber!

Be sure to check your surroundings because this stuff will sling, if you use a lot of it, and will stain a lot if things (i.e your clothes).

This will take forever but makes life easy when you are done!

Now that you have the truck taped off you can cover the other parts of the truck that you are not going to do at this time or have already done.



I did not cover the windows, I would advise you to cover yours. It took me a while to get the polish off them!

When you are polishing just work on a couple of doors or a section of the truck at a time. When you are working on a section do all three steps then cover that section up and move on.

The #1 polish get any scratches out so you normal use a lot of the #1. When you are working with polish make sure you use plenty of the polish because it cools it and because it is what actually gets all the scratches out. When you are done with the #1 you need to change pads to the right one for the #2 and wipe all the left over #1 polish off the truck. At this point the paint will look hazy and not very good, this is normal. #2 will start to shine it up. For #3 is the same, use appropriate pad and clean the truck off.

When you are done you pull of all the tape off and scrub the lines away. The scrubbing of the taped lines will take a lot of elbow grease, I used the soft side of the kitchen sponge!

This whole job took me about a full 20 hours to wash, polish ALL of the truck and wax it!

The propose of the wax is because the polish will rip any wax off and works on the clear coat, so when you are done it will feel really weird but that is normal. then when I am done with the polish I use really good wax and do the whole truck like you would normal wax it!

When you are done you should end up with something like this




This took some hard work to put together!!!!!! so please please please post your pictures of your hard work on here!!! I want to see some before, taped up, and after pictures!!!!!

I forgot to mention the 3M product line is the Perfect-it. That is the picture of the polish! That picture is from a kit on amazon with almost every thing that you need!

Amazon.com: 3M Perfect It BUFFING & POLISHING KIT Pad Compound Foam 39062 39061 39062 5723: Automotive

I spent 200 on all this and I got a cheaper foam pads but I did get tape. this is still a really good deal because it is almost an all in on shot!

man that looks nice! I have been wanting to get a polisher for a long time, which one did you get from harbor freight? did you get pads from there too?

I got the one in the picture it is like 60 dollars but is on sale for 40 online!no on the pads because that is a very important part in this process!

Looks great. Good info here, I'll be using this when I do mine.

5runnerz
Your 4Runners looks very very nice. From the write up I can tell you take pride in it and it shows.

Good write up, thanks

I have 2 questions that maybe you could ask your body shop friend.

How do you clean the pads?
After a while they start to look dirty and get residue from the polish compounds.

Also, if you do get wax or polish on a black plastic or rubber surface, how do you remove it.
I have tried professional grease and wax remover but it did not work


I am going to check out the 3M product line. For waxing I use Zaino products and I have been very happy with them.

Did you use the backing plate that came with the polisher? I keep hearing that they are too hard.

Yes you can wash them, I do every time I use it!

For wax I use the turtle wax ice. This wax you actually put it on the black trim to make it look new again, so you do have to worry about it getting where normal wax mess things up! I have used a bunch of different waxes and that one is my favorite so far and it is not even the most expensive!

Hey 5RUNNERZ!

Thanks for the writeup. I used the same HF unit to cut some oxidation:

Bad Oxidation and Meguiar's Medium Cut

I used a wool bonnet with terry cloth over it.

Where do you get the foam pads and how do they attach to the polisher? I found the polisher attachment options not so good.

Thanks.

Added to sticky ...

3rd Gen FAQ, Tutorials, & Documentation Reference

I have always dreamed of having my own sticky!!!

I just used the head that comes on the polisher. The head is just velcro and so are the backs of the pads, so it works great!

I think that when people say it is to hard, I think they are not using it properly because that is what the people that do this as a profession use.

Good write up. May want to mention the difference between polishing single stage and clear coats. Not sure why they did it, but some of our colors are single stage, and polishing it is a tad bit different than polishing clear coats.

Natural White revitalization thread

Well sort of.

Its a thread listed within the main sticky on 1st page..

I don't have power to edit the thread so I just add to it. One day I plan to remake the while thread. For now I just drop cool bookmarks there.

Very cool. Those high speed polishers look an awful lot like angle grinders, any particular reason I can't just use what I've already got?

the rotary polishers listed above (I have the HF one as well) have adjustable speed, where the grinders don't. otherwise yes they're the same. I wouldn't recommend polishing at the speed of a grinder though.