Hello Guys,
Just want to report back my finding with UC. It's been almost a year since I used UC on an entire car for any extensive correction. I have used UC here and there on other cars for spot touch-ups and testing with the Surbuf pads, but I haven't used UC much at all. I mainly grabbed other compounds such as SIP and M105 for any serious corrections lately.
Last week I detailed my black daily driver using the PCXP with the 5.5" orange CCS pads and Ultimate Compound. Areas that do not have much deep scratches were corrected with the 5.5" white CCS pads using UC. I utilized the Kevin Brown Method to squeeze a little more power out of the SMAT-based UC. The smaller defects such as swirls were 80-90% removed, while most of the RIDS were minimized. Due to the lack of time, I did not do any follow-up polishes. Instead I went straight to NXT 2.0 and called it a day.
While my daily driver is easily one of the glossiest cars in the typical parking lot, its surface is far from a perfect finish. Under strict lighting, I could see clearly the extremely small holograms induced by the orange pad and UC. I tried capturing the faint holograms on camera under the sun, but was unsucessful. The light holograms and marrings induced by UC are so light that they can only be seen under certain sun light condition with the naked eye. Although hardly noticeable, the holograms caused by UC is still noticeable if you have a trained eye.
The light holograms are nowhere near that produced by the rotary. They are expected. If I had more time, I would have followed-up Ultimate Compound with something like M205, SwirlX, or PO85RD. Eventually this summer I will go back to my daily driver and redo the entire car very quickly with SwirlX.
That was a mouthful, but the story is that UC does not finish perfectly on most surfaces. It may finish ALMOST LSP ready on hard audi or BMW paints, but on the typical paint it doesn't yield a perfect finish.
