How hard or soft a car’s paint is affects what processes, tools, pads and products you’ll need to achieve your paint correction goals. The question is, how do you know the difference?
In this edited clip from a recent LIVE detailing class, our Chief Education Officer Mike Phillips explains his method for telling the difference between hard and soft paint, why you need to know which you’re working with, and what to use for each type of paint.
Watch the video and check out the transcript below!
The following is an unedited transcript of the above video.
Everybody wants to know, how can you tell hard paint from soft paint? And everybody wants some kind of simple answer, but the honest answer is this. You do a test spot, and then you need experience. You have to have buffed out a few cars in your life, so when you do a test spot, you make some section patches on the paint, wipe off and look, and you see the scratches are gone, because of your experience, you’d be able to know, oh, this paint, definitely not hard because I got the scratches out just by doing a simple test spot.
If you do a test spot and you wipe off and there’s just tons of swirls and scratches left, then that starts to become an indicator that the paint is no longer in that soft spectrum. It’s up there to the medium or to the hard spectrum. But anyway, the bigger picture point is everybody wants an easy answer. The easy answer is you need experience. So if you’re brand new, a little more hard to do a test spot and determine if paint is hard or soft because there’s just so many variables. Maybe you didn’t push down on the polisher hard enough. Maybe you pressed down, you moved your arm too fast.
Maybe you’re using the wrong tool, the wrong pad, the wrong product. So there’s a lot of variables. But that’s what I’m saying. Once you become a seasoned expert, And detailers primarily, like, everybody has their flavor that they like, you know, whether it’s the Dr. Beasley’s or McGuire’s or Optimum Polymer Technologies. You know, there’s a lot of great products out there, and you have to become knowledgeable and comfortable and, keyword, experienced with that abrasive technology, because that’s really what it comes down to, is the abrasive technology, the pads, and the tools.
Okay, so this paint has soft paint. Now, it’s not the softest paint I’ve ever worked on. And some of you guys know what I talk about, that when you just take a towel and wipe the paint, the towel can leave a scratch. That’s really soft. But this is fairly soft. And if you want to come up here, Yancey, this is the kind of scratches that were left, let me know where to hold this, from the shop that wiped this down with a dirty rag.
Okay. Okay. So it’s not horrible, but this thing was flawless. I had this thing is already, it was already taken to a concourse deal of God. So when I was done and took third place, I mean, this thing was as close to fall as, as I could get it. And then it got all scratched up again.
So, to determine whether you have hard paint or soft paint what you want to do is called a test spot and now when you’re doing a test spot it’s usually a good idea for your initial test spot to not go to the extreme of one end and using a soft finishing pad and a fine cut polish or go to the extreme at the other end using an aggressive wool pad or microfiber pad and an aggressive compound you want to go right to that sweet spot in the middle find a polish not a compound not a finishing possible right in the middle a polish and a foam polishing pad and then do what I teach is eight section passes and then wipe off and inspect.
Now if all the defects are gone using a foam polishing pad and a polish, that would tell me that paint’s probably pretty soft or at least it’s on the soft side of medium. If it had little or no effect at all, then that would tell me that paints on the medium to hard side and now i need to start increasing either the aggressiveness of my product the aggressiveness of my pad and even a more aggressive tool and sometimes just more passes you know there’s a lot of different variables uh polishing paint i always use the uh back in the old days we had an equalizer remember that yancey had a craco equalizer instead of a pioneer.
You know, he got his- I had Alpine. He got his Kmart. And you know, you adjust it so the sound looks perfect, sounds perfect to you. Anyway, so I’m gonna- That’s a good analogy, though. I never thought of it that way. I’m just loving giving you a hard time every day. Okay, so this is arguably the safest tool in the world.
Okay, this is a Porter cable. It’s an eight millimeter free spinning polisher. And nowadays, back when this was introduced, I think Meguiar’s and Griot’s both introduced us to the paint polishing world about the same time, back in the 1980s. Because back then, all we had was rotaries and what they call a traditional orbital polish, which I have one back there. And the rotary is super aggressive, and the TOB, the traditional orbital buffer, is useless. It spreads wax. This is a great way to do a test spot because you know if you can fix it or dial in a process with this, you can always upgrade to a more powerful tool. I got the Rupes, I got the Flex here, the Griot’s Garage, and knock out the paint correction process even faster than this.
What is… It’s safe to say it’s a fairly slow tool when it comes to paint correction. It gets the job done, but it’s a turtle. OK, so what I’m going to do is I’m going to take and put a foam polishing pad on. So this, OK, and just real quickly, let me just show you this. These are Lake Country pads, but all the pad manufacturers have something very similar.
So this is a foam cutting pad. This is a foam polishing pad. and this is a foam finishing pad so this is fairly stiff and has a sharpness to it this is quite a bit softer not not really sharp at all and of course this is just gushy soft and there’s no softness to this at all in fact you know i always put my makeup on in the morning with this one that joke never gets old okay so right in this sweet spot this is a foam polishing pad let me center this up on the portrait table Okay, so. Let me come in here and I’m just gonna do a test spot.
And normally when you do a test spot, you wanna do a section about 16 inches by 16 inches. So, you know, just something kind of small. I always recommend doing it on a horizontal surface like the hood or the trunk lid that you can look down on to make inspection good. Plus, A lot of times, the horizontal surfaces take the brunt of the damage from Mother Nature and wear and tear. So the defects will be worse on the horizontal surfaces than more commonly on the vertical side. So you know if you fix it here, when you go and repeat the results of your test to the vertical panels, if it works here, it’s going to work there.
If you do it on the side and there’s not that many defects, then you jump up to one of the horizontal panels that might have more defects and deeper defects, you might find what worked on the side of the fender isn’t working on the hood, the trunk lid, or the roof. so that’s why I do a test spot on a horizontal surface okay so I’m just gonna do a test spot right here and to start this out in the Dr. Beasley line we call these primers because they prime the paint for the ceramic coating you don’t have to use a panel wipe after you use these you can go right to the coating there’s no organic ingredients in these they’re all inorganic so there’s nothing naturally occurring in there they’re very synthetic so to speak and in our line the 150 is the most aggressive the 45 is the least aggressive the 95 is right in that sweet spot in the middle so that’s what i’m going to use you always want to shake well before you use these are hyper concentrated so yancy knows me i’ve never been the pea-sized drop guy but when i came to work for dr beasley’s i had to retrain myself And basically, because this is a dry pad, I am gonna put down, let’s say, four drops.
But once that pad is broken in, you can literally drop down to just three pea-sized drops and work it twice as long than maybe you would. You always wanna see a film of product on the surface, but these are very unique to the industry of abrasive technology. Okay, so the first thing I’m gonna do at a low speed is I’m just gonna… I’m just gonna spread my product out to get it spread out. Okay, so here is my work area, and now I’ve got a uniform layer of abrasive technology.
My pad is more or less broken in, so now I’m gonna make eight solid suction passes, and for those that have watched these classes, me and Yancey have been put on for decades now, you know, one of the things I teach is when you’re in a room by yourself buffing, always count your suction passes out loud. If you dial in, that the car and the paint you’re working on needs two section passes, then count it out. One, two, move on. One, two, move on. If it takes 10, then count out 10, because what happens is the human mind tends to wander. You’ll forget where you’re at, and over the course of buffing out an entire car, you’ll start to make extra passes to make sure you made enough passes, and that’ll add… What pass was there?
Oh, I’ll just throw one more in. It’ll add a whole hour to the buffing time. So I meet guys that follow my advice all the time on this, and they say, thanks for that tip. It cut my buffing time down by an hour. So… Do it. Don’t do it. I don’t care. I do it all the time. Okay. All the pressure’s down on the head of the tool. Not back here or I would be buffing crooked. So put the weight down here. And then I’m pushing down. I’m pushing down about, I’d say, right now that’s about 15 pounds. I’m pretty good at guessing weight because what I’ve done in the past is I’ve put a tool like this on a normal bathroom scale and do the same thing. I push on this and then look and see what the scale says.
That was two. Three. Four. And I see a lot of scratches are still in there. Five. There’s six. By the way, as I move this over the paint, that’s called your arm speed. So if you ever see somebody talking about your arm speed, that’s what they mean. How fast are you moving your arms? Which are moving?
That was seven. And here’s eight. Nice and slow, very controlled. Always turn the polish off before you lift the pad off or you’ll throw splatter everywhere. And on these classic cars, Yancey, this is what you want to avoid is throwing splatter down what they call the fresh air grill. Whenever I go to a car show or if I need to sell a car personally or teach in a class, I teach the students and I practice myself to look down there to see if there’s little white splatter dots. The other guy’s wax.
Before I worked on the car, so I know the other guy did it now because it’s really hard to get them out. But when I find that there are splatter dots, I cover that up and I got a couple of techniques I can show how to cover that up safely. There’s another live detailing class. And but I’m not going to be the guy that put splatter dots down there. OK, so now when I come back and look at this.
There’s still a lot of scratches in here. So this paint is soft, I know from experience. But here’s what that means. The person that wiped this thing down was using a contaminated towel and put deeper scratches in because the shallow scratches came out, but the deeper ones are still there. So then what I would do from here is I would go ahead and bump up to a more aggressive pad, a more aggressive product, or a more powerful tool. You want me to demonstrate that?
You do you. You do me, I’ll do you. Okay, so tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to switch over. Give me the light. Yes. That way I can… okay i’m going to switch over to the beast all right he’s going to do that i’m going to show you where we’re at this is the beast all right and this is a gear driven eight millimeter so what’s interesting is both the porter cable and the beast are both eight millimeter it’s just one is free spinning and one is gear driven so one has a ton of power one is kind of weak there’s a few see the deeper scratches in there There’s a couple, but… Most of them came out.
Definitely better than what it was. Yeah, definitely. And, you know, look, this is a bona fide show car. You know, I use the term show car. Here’s how I would explain that. If you were to go to the local car show, you’d see a car like this on display. You actually might see one of these, too, because these are really cool cars. I was only ribbing you, saying it wasn’t cool. Yeah! Okay, so I put on a blue foam cutting pad. I’ve already broken this one in because I actually have to finish this car tonight.
When you guys all get done watching this and you go home, I’ll be here working late. Atta boy. So here is three. I tried to get pea-sized drops, but it came out as nickel-sized drops. This is, by the way, the new 150. So they’ve increased the abrasive powders on this so it cuts faster. So let me just go ahead and spread this out, and then I’ll make it six more passes, and we’ll come back and look again.
So they’re spreading. I’m gonna push. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Okay, I’m gonna bring my pressure up a little bit. Do a little finish polishing. There’s guys out there that teach to maintain the same pressure Throughout the entire buffing cycle, I’ve never believed in that. I believe polishing paint is an art form, not a grinding process. But you know, whatever works for you.
Okay, now I’m not looking for a perfect finish. What I’m looking for is all them deeper scratches are gone, and now they are gone. Okay, and that’s just one of the factors, Yancey. When you’re detailing cars, not only is it paint hardness, softness, or that sweet spot in between, which is really where you want your car paint, but it’s the depth of the defects. A deeper defect will just take longer to buff out. The paint might be soft, but it’s deep. You gotta take more paint off. It’s always a leveling process.
Okay, from here, the next thing I would do, and then I’m gonna dial in my process. Again, this is a show car. So I need to put a show car finish on it. It’s actually going to another Concours d’Elegance in February. So I put a foam polishing pad. This is the 95. I’m gonna come back and refine. Just, there you go, here’s pea-sized drops. Okay. That’s what you want after your pad, oops, after your pad’s broken.
Okay, and we’re going to talk about pads here in a second, too. Don’t let me forget to cover that microfiber. Okay. Okay, product spread out. Now I’m just kind of refining. Refining takes fewer passes. I think that was four, basically. Okay. And come back in. That actually is an acceptable finish for a show car, and I could go ahead and ceramic coat that. For this car, I’m gonna do the optional step. I do that for all show car work. I’m gonna hit it with the NSP45 and a soft foam finishing pad.
Only because this is soft paint, I’m gonna switch over to a free-spinning random orbital. Now, I posted a little video clip about this coming up and someone mentioned to me, hey, Mike, I saw you using a free spinning tool. And, you know, look, I am known as a beast guy, but I want to tell you, I believe long stroke polishers like this Bigfoot 21, I believe they will put the nicest finish, especially on softer paints, just because of that random polishing. The action of the tool. Yeah, just because it’s not gear-driven.
And I found on soft paints that oftentimes a gear-driven tool like the Beast will induce marring that a free-spinning tool won’t. I actually found that out buffing out a Ferrari P3, red single stage. You can find that article on Google still. But I cut it. I did the first step with the beast, and I come back and use the port-a-cable.
And someone came up in my article and says, Mike, why’d you switch over to the port-a-cable? I says, yeah, because soft single-stage paint finish out better, more consistently with this free-spinning tool like this than a gear-driven tool. Okay, let’s watch the magic happen. This, by the way, was given to me by Rupes. It is the number 16 Mark II ever built. Okay, spit my product out.
And you know me, Yancy, if there was a seven, I would go to it. There’s five. And now we’re just talking about the weight of the tool. These are such nice tools. They’re so ergonomic, well-balanced. I can’t wait to get my hands on the new electric one. And you can see with NSP 45, we’re barely abrading, we’re barely pulling any paint, so it’s very, it’s a true finishing polish. Okay, come in here and just wipe this off.
And now we have a flawless finish. This is going to look good when this thing’s out on the lawn at the next car show in full sun. The owner can be proud of it. He can show it off. And if he’s lucky, maybe someone will come by and offer him a huge price for it. Okay, do you want to come and look at that at all?
Yeah, let me go ahead and hit the light. Sure. And bounce it up at me. Go back towards the windshield. There you go. yeah that is that is flawless it’s flawless okay so now ready for coding here’s the question somebody say somebody just bought this car how would they know that it’s soft paint or what the average owner would never know how to tell except for if every time they washed it and dried it they saw more and more swirls and scratches so good question so always i always teach this The way swirls and scratches get into car paint are by the way we touch it.
And here’s how we touch it. Wash mitt, drying towel, wiping towel. Before you wash the car, you need to inspect that wash mitt. If you see like a stick or some leaves in there, don’t be using it on this. Your drying towel, a lot of drying towels now, really nice. They got this big closed loop. They absorb water like nothing. But that closed loop, sticks will go into it, okay, and get trapped in there.
So you can’t drop them on the ground. You’ve gotta keep them clean. And when you dry the water off the car, you’re gonna scratch the car. and of course your wiping towels of course you know me ansi i always teach people before you use a towel look at it feel it with your hand and keep a pair of tweezers handy i got tweezers over there by the laundry station and if a lot of times you can pull it out if you can’t then i take and turn this into something to wipe oil off the ground in here when these cars like yours leak oh no all right now the second question okay um when you’re doing or second i don’t know what you call it So say you got this car and you’re having troubles, you know, it’s like constantly leaving micro-marring and stuff like that. How do you know what to fix?
Okay, well… Like say somebody else, how do you know that you’d find the right chemical? well it would go back to start with the test spot yeah and and here’s where like and that can be kind of hard because what if you’re working on a white or a silver or a beige colored car it’s going to be hard to see micro marring but there’s some products out there that they’re just not what you think they’re not as good as you hope and not what you think so how about i do a little demonstration here and i’m not trying to make anybody look bad but this is a finishing polish from another company Not going to say the brand. I’m going to take and I’m going to put on a super soft pad.
So I’ve got a finishing pad over here. Feel that, Yancy. Is that soft? Here, I’ll let the people feel it. It is so soft. Okay. Center that up. That’s a humongous. And what I’m going to do is you just saw me polish up this section here. I’m just going to run the polisher down the center here and then we’ll take a look and see how that looks. Again, keep in mind, this is a finishing polish. It’s sold as a finishing polish. You’d expect it to be good. It’s on the market. Isn’t everything on the market good? Okay.
That’s what the Facebook ad said. Light pressure. Little bit of paint coming off, it’s not an aggressive product. I’m gonna get a fresh towel. Okay. Let’s grab our handheld light here. Okay, see how it’s cloudy now? Go back towards the windshield. There you go. All right, go over. Come this way? Right here’s where I buffed. It’s foggy now where this is clear back here. All right, go. Here, let me see the light.
Okay, yeah, Yancy’s better at doing this. All right, it’s clear. And it gets foggy. Foggy, cloudy looking. That’s micro marring. There’s the, here, hold that light like right. Right there? Yeah. Okay. The line is right there is where the fogginess is at. Okay, so the pad didn’t do that. The abrasive technology did that. So you know, look, you can see how the light I’m getting it in there. You can see how the light go back towards the windshield. There you go. Keep going. Keep going. Keep going. Keep going.
Right there. See how right there it’s all nice and clear. Rich color, rich in color. Then you come over this way. It starts to get cloudy. Then it’s foggy. Then you can actually see a halo form around the light. Yeah, okay. It is. Whoa, shit. There’s a car there. Don’t scratch your car. Okay, so here’s the behind-the-scenes story. Before I went to work for Dr. Beasley’s, I was working on this car with that product, and I thought that product was really good. And it was removing the defects, removed them fine. but it didn’t leave the paint looking good. It left it all cloudy. So I just happened to have the Dr. B’s NSP primers with me.
So I threw one of those on a pad, and everywhere I polished it, it turned it clear. And I was going, wow, I thought that other stuff had good abrasive technology. This stuff has better abrasive technology. Because it’s one thing to be able to make a product that will work on hard paint like that.
But if you can make a product that will work on both hard and soft paint, you’ve really dialed it in. In fact, one of my chemist friends told me the hardest thing that he had to do was create, you know, compounds and polishes and AIOs all in one things with abrasives that worked on the wide spectrum of paint both hard and soft he says that’s the hardest part about the chemistry is easy to make one for like a specific paint but not for every paint anyway all right now let’s bring in the pad pads okay so let me sit back here and what I wanted to do is because I’ve been in this industry for so long I know where all the bodies are buried I was at McGuire’s when they invented the microfiber pad.
They invented it for the OEM. It’s used on these things called polishing decks, where if they saw a defect in the paint, they would pull it out to the side, they would fix it. They had to do it real quick and fast, and they needed a pad that would cut fast and polish good. And so they made these things called microfiber pads. That’s the history for them. They were something for the OEM.
In fact, when I was at McGuire’s, The office just outside of my office and Mike Pennington’s office was a cabinet full of these OEM microfiber pads. And this is back in 2003, 2004. And I don’t think McGuire’s introduced the commercial system that everybody knows about until about 2011 or 2012.
Yeah, we did the video. with Jason because we made the video Jason Rose and Mike Pennington out there and but here was the here’s behind the scenes story that no one’s are gonna tell you the reason Meguiar’s brought out the microfiber da system at least one of the reasons was to try to get the industry off of wool pads on rotary buffers because all the dealerships and all the auction houses and all the detail shops they would cut with these but at least holograms the fibers themselves leave a cut in the paint called a hologram. Okay, so then you got to come back and fix it.
But in the industry, they didn’t fix it. They just send the car out and other people get their cars and kick it out the door with my car look all swirled out. So they came up with microfiber pads. Here’s a couple real popular ones. This is a Rupes. This is a Buff and Shine. This is a Lake Country and everybody knows that one.
Yeah, that Oreo. And I’m not sure what these are. I picked these up at SEMA from somebody. But they’re fiber pads that you can use on a DA. But here’s the thing. And back then, Meguiar’s was selling what they call the G100, which is basically a copy of this. It’s an 8-millimeter free-spinning polisher. So how do you make something that’s so weak like this able to do correction like this? you change the pad. So you add fiber, which is an abrasive. So that was one component. The other component was the chemicals, of course. And anyway, they introduced this thing called the microfiber DA system.
And it was an effort to get the industry off of wool pads on rotaries, put a lot of holograms in, still give a guy a tool that could finish that could cut well but also finish out nice and for the most part and this was primarily targeted at production detailing not show car detailing but production detail which would get you by but that’s kind of the history but this is where the problem is anytime you’re using a fiber pad okay the fibers, these individual fingers, are cutting the paint. That’s great, you’re getting a braiding ability.
The problem is when people try to finish with these on softer paints. This would probably finish out, Yancey, on your hard paint just fine. But when you get to medium to soft paints, it’s gonna leave tick marks, DAAs, or what we call micro-marking, and it’s the fibers. And the reason foam doesn’t do that because foam has a uniform surface texture it doesn’t have individual fibers cutting the paint so what i always tell people most people know i don’t use a lot of microfiber pads in any of my detail work i quit showing them in my classes i show people look if you need to get in there and cut You get the wool pattern.
Get in, get out. That’s what I like to say. And then come back with a foam pad on any brand of orbital, remove the holograms and have that show car finish. But anyway, that’s a, that’s a little bit. I just wanted to talk about pads because I know a lot of people really love my parents. I don’t, I don’t have nothing against them. I just don’t use them because I know how to use something that’s quicker, faster.
And then I switched over to foam on orbitals. All right, anything else you got on this? I’m looking at my notes. Oh, here’s something. You know, when I go up in the internet world, a lot of times I see people, if they’re asking a question about buffing out a car, and they’re going to use an AIO, an all-in-one. In the old days, we called it a cleaner wax. We make one called Z1. Instead of putting wax down, it puts down ceramic. And it removes swirls and scratches just great. And you can buff out a car in one step.
That’s the whole point of an AIO. But here’s the problem I see in the internet world. If someone asks how to use an AIO, And the experts in the industry will say, well, what you need to do is get a foam cutting pad or a microfiber pad to use with that AIO, because that way you’ve got the smorgasbord foam or the fiber working for you to get the defects out to make that customer happy.
That sounds like perfect logic. The problem is, if you end up on a paint that’s soft, like say a lot of Hondas have soft paint, and you’re using a cutting pad or a microfiber pad trying to do one step, you will leave micromarring. You’ll stand back and look at it, and then you’ll rebuff the car with a foam pad and something less aggressive to pull the micromarring, and you just turned what should have been a one step into two steps.
You just lost any profit you would have made. So anyway, so… keep that in mind that you can’t always use an aio with aggressive pad if the paint is off on a harder paint you could get away with it but the the other thing is is there’s another side of that coin when people are talking about offering their customers or for your own cars doing a one-step process, if you’re doing it for money, the first thing you should do is explain to the customer that if they choose your one-step package, not your three-step package like I’m doing to this car, it costs less. But the downside is you’re not gonna get all the swirls and scratches out, so don’t promise to.
Tell the customer, look, Bob, I can get them all out, but that’s my package two or package three, not my package one, which is an AIO. Happy to do it, takes more time, will cost you more money. And then they say, well, no, this is my budget. Fine, but you need to set their expectations because otherwise they’ll come in and go, I don’t know, Mike, I still see some pretty deep scratches here in the hood on this GTO. And I’ll say, well, you picked my entry-level package, an AIO.
I’m never going to get them out with that. It takes more work, takes more time, takes more past, more chemicals, different tools. So you have to educate your customers on that. Then a test spot fiber versus Oh, single stage versus base gold clear coat. Uh, when we talk about hard paint and soft paint and notice how I’m going to preface this, I’m going to say, generally speaking, okay, Generally speaking, modern clear coats are harder than traditional single stage paints, generally speaking.
The exception to the rule is single stage white paint, because when you’re working on a base coat clear coat finish like this, you’re working on pure resin. Whatever that paint system is, DuPont, Sikkens, Glazerit, PBG, the base coat, the colored part and the flake in this case are below the clear coat. So all you’re working on is clear coat, which technically is called resin. It’s a paint resin.
Now, when you work on single stage, it’s resin plus pigment is mixed in, kind of like a gel coat boat. It’s polyester resin with pigment. If it’s a blue boat, it’s blue pigment. And what happens is the hardness or the softness of the pigment adulterates or pollutes or contaminates the resin, making it either harder softer and the pigment they used to create white is titanium dioxide powder it’s a very hard mineral.
You mix it with the resin and paint a car now you’ve got a really hard single stage paint the softest paint is single stage black because the pigment for black is carbon black and a simple analogy or a simple example for carbon black is lift up the hood of a barbecue and the black suit don’t do this when it’s hot okay i hope not that black soot that’s a simple form of carbon black it’s very black okay and it’s very soft now you add that with resin now that paint job is very soft in fact one of the softest paint jobs i’ve ever buffed out would be two i did a 1949 pontiac convertible and i did a 1994 porsche.
The Porsche had base coat clear coat, very, very soft. In fact, I fixed that paint job with a Lake Country foam finishing pad and a fine cut polish. I pulled every defect out with those non-abrasive pads and products. And then the Pontiac, I think I actually finished it out the same basic way, just a finishing pad. And at the time I was using a fine cut AIO. and got a flawless finish on both black paints. But that’s kind of the difference between base coat clear coat and single stage. Generally speaking, base coat clear coats are harder than single stage. The exception is white single stage paint.
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