doctorttt

I know there are a number of posts explaining how to remove them, but I just want to know whether swirls are permanent? Thanks

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iTrader: (17)

Yes, permanent in the sense that they will not go away until you remove them. Swirls are scratches. A scratch will stay in the paint until you remove it using an abrasive polish.

doctorttt

Just to follow up, there are professional polish services out there to remove them, right?

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iTrader: (17)

Yes there are.

Your best bet is to joining a good detailing forum like detailingbliss.com and ask who people recommend for swirl removal in your area.

The worst thing you can do is pay some generic volume based detail shop $100 bucks for a "buff and shine" and end up ruining your paint even more....because believe me they do not give a rat's *** about your car lol.

A good detailer who is experienced in paint correction will ALWAYS do a test spot on your car to show you what the different stages of polishing can do on your paint so you know exactly what to expect when the entire car is done. Anything less and you're just throwing your money away for someone to take a half hour around your car and do sht work for a lack of better word.

steven1f

No check out Superior Shine web site one the best.

jfelbab

Some thoughts on swirls... your paint is delicate. Running your vehicle through car washes that use cloth or brushes will introduce swirls. If you wash it yourself and don't use good technique and materials you can introduce swirls. Anything that touches your paint can potentially leave swirls. So before you have the swirls removed, consider that unless you concentrate on how they got there in the first place your car may have swirls again in short order.

As mentioned swirls are fine scratches in the paint. To get rid of swirls you need to remove the paint surrounding the swirls to level the paint. Removing paint is not a good thing in that it is so thin to start with. Paint is about as thick as a piece of printer paper. You can not remove paint indefinitely before you have paint failure. Paint is it's hardest, densest and glossiest at the surface and as you remove paint through polishing, the paint left is less dense, less glossy and definitely softer. The point here is that it is better to do as much as possible to avoid swirls than to continually remove them.

The picture is not all bleak. There are some new coating products available that are as hard as the paint, perhaps even harder. They are several times thicker and last many times longer than most wax and sealants. If these coatings get swirls, polishing will only remove the coating and not the paint.

doctorttt

Just to confirm: it sounds that swirls are not fine scratches on the clear coat but on the paint?

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iTrader: (17)

swirls are fine scratches in the clearcoat.

Some cars don't have a clearcoat as a separate layer, so in that case swirls are scratches in the actual paint.

jfelbab

Clear coat is paint without pigment. Most newer cars use a base coat and a clear coat. Some manufacturers use a single stage paint on certain solid colors but the paint surface is indeed what is getting swirled.

doctorttt

Thanks for everyone's input. I did some research on the forum, and I'm going to bring my car to this expert called Philip in NJ to polish it.

The swirls on my car are pretty light, and I guess that the tech will have to fix the clear coat? My initial concern was the base paint; as long as the base paint is not damaged, I'm fine with it.