Hello, I recently used a polishing compound to remove minor scratches from the car. Now, after 2 weeks I noticed huge whiteish circular marks on the front bumper that the cloth left as I was applying the compound. I think that I forgot to remove the compound from this area and it dried on the paint. The problem is that the marks don't go away, I tried using alcohol and polishing(again) but it doesn't have any effect whatsoever.
Any ideas?
BTW It's a 97 LHS forrest green and the while circular strokes really stand out :(
NEVER use any kind of compound on a vehicle finished with clear coat paint. You have fogged (scratched) the clear coat. Your only re-course is to continue to polish (with less gritty products) the area until the micro scratches are gone. And hope that you don't break through to the color coat.
Hate to break it to you but there isn't any polishing compound there. The whiteish marks are scratches and possibly acidic etching (you didn't say what compound you used and how harsh it was, etc.)
The advice given for swirl marks (use a glaze) is what you follow for your problem. Unfortunately, with paint, unless you repaint it, none of the car-care products (glaze, etc) will put back missing clearcoat or color coat material. All they basically do is either fill up the scratches with wax or wax-polymer compound (which will wash out eventually) to bring the scratch up to the level of the rest of the remaining paint or clear coat, or they grind down the paint or clear coat around the scratch to bring it down to the level of the bottom of the scratch. The result is a flat smooth surface which gives the reflective shiny wet look people want to see.
Today's car finishes are not nearly as hard as paint jobs in bygone years. This is the result of people wanting a more shiny wet look than cars used to have, and the result of the EPA and such trying to get paint manufacturers and auto painters to reformulate and change application procedures so as to minimize the release of fumes from the paint. As a result they scratch more easily, and get damaged by bird shit and bugs and dust a lot easier. The best thing a car owner can do to protect the paint is to wax the car often.
For scratches, the old school advice was to polish them out because years ago, car finishes were a lot thicker and often there was no clear coat used. Today, for scratches that don't completely penetrate the clear coat, it's best to use a wax or glaze that fills them up. Clear coats are vital to protecting the paint from sunlight and polishing them down thinner to get rid of a scratch is just compromising the color paint coat that much faster, in my opinion.
The only time in my opinion you should be using a polish is if the paint is not clear coated and it's so far gone that the top layer is dead - that whitish dusty stuff. And then you use it with a set of buffing wheels and you start with the most abrasive polish and use successively less abrasive polishes until the paint is shiny again. Of course, you have to keep in mind that after you do that, the paint is so thin that unless you wax it at least once a month, that the paint isn't going to last more than about 5-8 years.
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