Paint correction in Earlwood

Every swirl and scratch is a groove in the clear coat. To make it vanish you can fill the groove or you can bring the surface around it down until the groove is gone. Those are the only two options and they are not the same job.

Glazes and filler polishes take the first route. The car looks corrected when it leaves and it looks like it did before after a few washes, because the filler has gone and the grooves were always there. Very cheap correction is nearly always this.

We do the second thing. An abrasive compound on a machine polisher removes a tiny, measured layer of clear coat until the surface is flat again. The scratch has not been covered. The paint around it has been brought down to its level, and it is gone.

That is why correction changes the colour rather than just adding shine. Light finally has a flat surface to reflect off, so it returns as a defined image instead of scattering. On black paint the difference is startling.

This is the reason most correction gets booked. A coating is transparent and cures over whatever is underneath, so applying one to swirled paint seals those swirls in for the life of the coating, which on a good product is years.

After correction every panel is wiped down to strip polishing oils, so the coating bonds to bare corrected paint rather than to residue. Skipping that is why some coatings fail within months while the same product on the next car lasts years.

It also works the other way around: a coating is what stops you needing correction again, because it makes washing safer and easier.

It is available mobile and it is the job that needs the most planning of anything we do.

Correction is slow. A two-stage job is not a couple of hours, and if a coating follows it the car then needs time to cure before it gets wet.

Shade is close to essential. Direct summer sun makes product flash off the panel before it can be worked properly, and it makes the panel too hot to work safely. A garage or carport is ideal.

Tell us where the car will be parked and whether you need it driveable in between. Occasionally the honest answer is that the studio is simpler that week.

Paint hardness varies enormously between makes. Many Japanese and Korean clear coats are soft and correct quickly but haze easily. German clear coats are often hard and take far longer to cut, and some newer ceramic-hardened clears are harder again.

That changes the pad, the compound and the time, which is why the make is the first thing we ask. A combination that is perfect on a hard clear coat will wreck a soft one, and vice versa.

The test section settles it. Before the car is committed to anything we polish one small area with the gentlest combination likely to work and check it in the sun. Then we know.

A good share of the correction we do is repairing an earlier job. Holograms, the wavy rainbow marks you see on a black car in the sun, are rotary polisher trails from a cut that was never refined. Buffer burn on edges is where a machine was held too long in one place.

Holograms come out. They are a fine defect and a proper refining stage removes them. Burn-through to primer does not, and neither does the paint thickness that the previous job used up, which is why we read the paint before agreeing to anything.

If a dealer’s paint protection package left the car looking worse than it arrived, this is the usual reason and it is usually fixable.