techniques to avoid sling?

[buellwinkle]

I haven't tried it with a rotary yet but the way Mike at Meguiars does it is he puts the product on the pad and then dabs it in about 4 places. Then he polishes a small area and when he needs more product, he tilts the pad and picks it up to continue polishing. The way I do it and I do get some sling but not bad is I put a small amount in the center of the pad and then quickly fan it across the car while it's getting up to speed, this spreads out the product quickly and doesn't sling much. I'm going to try the LC concave pads next.

 

[ahains]

because of the way *direction* that the buffers spins the pad the best way to feed the polish from a strip or line to the pad is by letting it enter the pad at between 7&8 oclock with a movement of from right to left. Use a slight angle on the pad to allow the polish to feed into the pad



after you have fed the polishing in the pad, then lay the pad flat.



This, with practice will help to eliminate sling.



*** because of this the best way to eliminate/minimize holograms and swirl marks is to make you final pass with the buffer in a right to left movement.

I know this is a very old post, but I have a question on this useful advice.

It seems to me that with a rotating circle, direction does not matter with all things being equal (pad perfectly flat, pressure of pad exactly perpendicular to surface).



Since it seems common to pickup product in a right to left sweep, I assume that when the buffer is not perfectly flat and pressure not perfectly perpendicular most right handed folks have more pressure on the 12 o'clock side (perhaps subliminally). So then I'm guessing that swirling is reduced in right to left motion because the clockwise rotary is giving the greatest force pushing "away" from the direction of travel? It does seem intuitive to me that if the force is pushing against the direction of travel that it would be a bit less smooth, perhaps more abrasive, etc.



I'm going to try and follow this advice of finishing right to left, I'm just wondering on the "why" of how it benefits.

It also makes me wonder if all of you great rotary operators learn to naturally pull the rotary to keep a similar optimization regardless of direction. For instance - when you are making a sweep to the right perhaps there is a bit more force/tilt in the 8 o'clock region of the pad to keep the pad pushing away from the direction of travel?



I'm so glad I came across the Kleen Car articles link today! Man those are some great articles for a rotary newbie!