What Is Paint Correction? What It Means and How It’s Done – The Basics
Paint correction is quite possibly the best way to make an average vehicle stand out from the crowd. It’s the Hollywood Hero of the detailing industry due to the drastic before/after shots that are shared online every day. What exactly is paint correction and how does it work?
What does paint correction mean?
The term “paint correction” refers to the process of removing defects (scratches, etching, oxidation, etc.) from your paint through different stages of machine polishing.
Some people may refer to this process as buffing, cutting and polishing, or even just simply: “polishing”. None of these are incorrect but the modern detailing world has moved toward the term “paint correction” as more of an industry standard.
How does paint correction work?
Removing scratches and defects requires the surface of the paint to be leveled. People are often confused by thinking that scratches can be “pulled” out of your paint magically. This is not the case at all.
In order to remove a scratch, the paint in the surrounding area needs to be removed until it’s level with the lowest point of the scratch. So in a way, you aren’t working on the scratch itself – you’re working on the area around it.
Imagine digging a hole at the beach. Rather than filling the hole in with sand, we’re removing the sand across the entire beach until it’s level with the bottom of the hole, making it disappear.
For some, this concept is terrifying. Yes, paint is being removed. But we’re doing so in very small, sometimes microscopic amounts. The average light scratch can be removed without taking more than a couple of microns of paint off. Deep scratches are a different story and will need to have the pros and cons weighed before deciding whether to remove them or not.
So how do we level the surface of the paint? Technically, it can be done by hand but 95% of the time machine polishers are much more effective. Detailers will use a range of equipment to get the job done:
Machine polisher – either rotary or dual action (random orbital)
Polishing pads – made from foam, microfiber, or wool in a range of different sizes
Compound or polish depending on the step being done