Can you damage your car with a buffer?
You certainly can damage a car's paintwork with a buffer.
Aside from the issue of introducing buffer trails and swirl marks, there are three main ways you can damage a car with a buffer.
Damage types
Burning the Paintwork
Rotary buffers, especially those with coarse pads such as lamb's wool can create a great deal of heat. In some older styles of buffing, this is actually used as an advantage, with friction being used to make the painted panel hot. It is however to cause friction burns on the paintwork which will cause the clear coat to have a rough, white milky appearance. Depending on the severity, it may be possible to wet-sand this out, but is quite likely to be permanent damage.
As this style of machine polishing has fallen out of favour, this type of damage is less likely now. However, it is still possible to burn rubbers and trim, which is why it is best to mask up sensitive areas of the car.
Polishing through the Clear Coat
Polishing compounds are abrasive, which means that when you machine polish a car, you are removing some of the clear coat. If the car has been polished many times before, or the clear coat went on thin at the factory, it is possible to polish right through it to the base coat. This is especially possible if using cutting compounds.
Special care should be taken on corners, pane edges and swage lines. The clear coat can be thinner in these areas, and they can provide high points where it is easy to apply too much pressure.
This is something which we actually do every now and again, which sounds like a terrible thing to admit to, but there is method in the madness. You have to cut quite deep into the paintwork to remove scratches, and this process will often start with wet-sanding. There are cases where a customer brings a car to us with a deep scratch which, in our opinion, should probably be repaired by having the panel repainted. As repainting is much more expensive than paintwork correction, there really is nothing to lose in attempting to buff out the scratch, even if there is a risk of buffing through and making it worse. If we fail, it doesn't matter because the customer would have the panel repainted anyway. If we succeed, we could save the customer a lot of money, so there is nothing to lose by taking the risk.
Contamination
It is extremely important to maintain a clean work environment, should grit or dirt contaminate the buffing pad, this could result in random orbital scratch marks over as much of the car as you attempted to polish before noticing you had a problem.
Damage to trim
Rotary polishers, spinning very fast can catch trim, they can also bind, causing them to hop where they can bash into delicate areas of the car. Random orbital polishers oscillate at high speed and can also bash sensitive trim or catch edges of features.
There are a couple of additional ways in which polishers can cause damage, the firstly is simply dropping the polisher on the car, especially when it is in motion. The other is dragging the cable across the paintwork.
Written by Danny Argent. Last updated 20/02/2023 15:40