A lot of times when I do a car I'll show the owner the pads if the paint was bad. In this case he never picked the car up untill 8 last nite so I just took pic of the pads before I washed them.

Car was a POS early 90s red Acura Integra that was perfect inside but the paint had never been waxed and the most washes were a drive through at the local industrial site here. The wash is more just to rinse off any potential acid residue that may have fallen on the car. Trouble is its partially recycled water and a lot of the people go through way too fast.

I left clean pads on the right for his reference. The black is mostly off the horizontal surfaces.

I didn't even want to do the car so I priced it a 2 x my normal rate to scare him off ... he still went for it even tho there is a lot of rock chipping and acid damage on the paint.

I didn't take pix of the car cuz it looked good but not bragging material .

 

wow, thats just nasty!

 

 

Dale,

Single stage paint or is the color from oxidation? Either way,

 

The wing on the trunk was single stage .. the rest base/clear badly acid damaged and oxidized.

 

How many times can you re-use the pads...?

Are those pads...now just garbage?

 

Some are 3 years old .. can be used lots of times if respected ... I wash them the same day I use them.

 

Do you wash them in the washing machine or by hand?

 

Yes, how can you recover those pads to reuse? I generally hand wash in warm water an woolite but I don't think my process can touch those pads.

 

By hand in Blue Dawn ,, gently kneed them then into a rinse pail to purge the soap.. squeezing them under water .. then onto a spare backing plate on my cordless drill to spin near dry .. then on a drying wrack.

 

Oh ok.

Cool.

Thanks for the tip.

 

Here is a pix of the same pads on the drying rack

 

Yeah...they cleaned up nice.

 

I wash them by either using the Grit Guard Universal Pad Washer or by hand using Dawn. A lot of other detailers use Dawn Power Dissolver which I have yet to try.

 

I use Dawn by hand myself. After I squeeze all of the water out, I'll put them facing outward in the washing machine on spin cycle only. After that I'll set them out to dry. The cleaning process is a lot of work when using M105, or after polishing SS paint.

 

Oh...I just looked up that Pad Washer.

Pretty snazzy but unless I start getting into it more...

Couldn't justify the price.

 

Yeah, I just got this last year so I haven't had it for that long really. It's pretty nice though... it saves quite a bit of time versus washing by hand.

 

Was it a black car? Hope you didnt burn the paint.........

 

^

 

^ Sorry........