Experienced Rupes DA Polishing Users: The Benefit Of Having An Emergency Ultra Soft Pad Collection

by Rodney Tatum

I experienced the value of having a wax pad aka no cut finishing pad options in my arsenal.

This vehicle, while performing a paint correction, yielded surprisingly frustrating results. While polishing with the industry standard polishing pads. Excess paint/pad residue led to an undesirable finish. Haze is to the Dual Action polisher as holograms are to Rotary polishers. I rarely have these problems. But I have yet to experience paint issues like this.

Usually on a long throw DA (powerful DA) that is known for refinement, it is actually BETTER to use polish pad that is slightly more aggressive than your soft or ultra soft pad. The Rupes Yellow pad is the most popular pad that falls into this sweet spot. This is the conventional yet counter-intuitive option depending on the quality of pad especially, but softer finickier paints will mar more easily with the softest option due to its uber bend-ability.

This is one of the reasons why the Rupes Yellow pad may be the most popular polishing pad amongst professionals.

What if all conventional methods and even your unconventional plan do not work? In addition, what if you have stubborn polish residue embedded into the paint? Sometimes you are working with extremely soft or for other reasons difficult paint. Back to the extremely soft pad option! A soft wax pad, working at a very low speed, can serve as your emergency use pad in some cases.

In all cases, when your finish is not as good as you like, changing pads more frequently is a good idea.

A softer pad (Lake Country Black HDO Pad) is pictured below.

To deal with the problem pictured here I used my polishers at times speed 1 to 2 going with 3 section passes. When you are performing paint correction professionally, dealing with a variety of vehicles (circumstances) you may run into unusual problems.