Meg #7, Glaze or Polish? Which is it!

T

thinkweb

New member
So after washing and claybaring I'm ready to polish. I had always thought that you use a polish, followed by a glaze to cover the swirls of the polish. My #7 show car glaze seems to be both? Some one's gotta explain this to me.
 
Simply put, a glaze is a product designed to fill and hide minor surface defects and provide a high gloss. A true glaze does not have any cleaning or polishing ability. It's mostly comprised of oils and fillers. Think of glaze as makeup for car paint. It doesn't fix defects, it only hides them.



A polish is a product designed to improve or restore paint by removing defects like oxidation, swirl marks, scratches, etc. There is a huge number of polishes, from very mild to liquid sandpaper. Some improve paint by chemical action, some by mechanical action, and some by both. Polishes are used before glazes.



This article may help clarify things a bit: http://www.bettercarcare.com/articles.php?articleId=28
 
Meg's #7 is a high oil content glaze meant to be used by hand only. If you are using a machine to do this work you're better off with #3 Machine Glaze or #81 Hand Polish. None of these products have the ability to remove defects.
 
Really abrasive products won't break down properly as not enough heat is generated.



For glazes, I've always caused streaking etc. when using it on a machine. Glazing by hand is soo easy that I've never really gone back and done it by machine.



Meguiar's Machine glaze is a bit different in that it has a very slight polish action to it.



Plus, Mike's instructions on how to use No. 7 are interesting in using a terry towel to first break the glaze the surface and following up with a second time to remove residual oil. You wouldn't be able to do that with a machine.
 
I am fairly certain that the way Mike Phillips explained why they call some of their non-abrasive glazes polishes is because they partially rely on the natural abrasiveness of the applicator to polish the paint while it is lubricated with the glaze. This is especially true with rotary polishers. Since these types of machines (different from the PC) create a lot of heat and friction, they can perform some polishing in this way.



By hand or random orbital (like the PC) much less heat is made, so we have to rely more on the hardness of the pad or the abrasive content of the product itself.





Another answer to your question would be that products are formulated differently when intended for "machine" (usually implying rotary) use because of the increased heat and different working conditions.
 
At the risk of reviving a dead horse, the problem with figuring out Meguiar's terminology is that they don't use the term "polish" like _most_ other companies do. When I think "polish", I'm thinking something that has some abrading ability. Meg's lumps anything that has either an abrading or cleaning action into the classification of "cleaner", and pretty much calls what I would term a "glaze" into their "polish" category.



Jeff Laughhunn
 
But on Megauiar's website #7 is under polish......what do you think?

Is there a pure polish nowadays? I think most companies mixed polish and glaze together now.
 
The problem is simple: "Polish" is a very loosely defined word. It's just up to us to know what products are. Unfortuante, but that's the way it is....
 
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