CEE DOG said:
...I do have one question. Its insignificant to me as I clean my pad so often regardless but you mentioned the pad staying cleaner longer. I don't follow.. if a pad is cutting paint it is going to be just as clogged over the course of the amount of paint it cuts regardless of machine. It may cut faster or slower but if two identical pads are used on an identical sized section with identical polishes and are used to cut identical amounts of paint they will both contain identical amounts of clear coat and buildup. Do I make sense or am I missing something?...
"Keep pads cleaner (particularly foam pads), as they do not have an ability to become tied or knotted or clumped together the way fibrous pads might (wool, microfinger, microfiber, felt, etc.)"
No, you make sense... I bullet-pointed a lot of things.
Imagine that you are hand sanding a painted panel using a sheet of sandpaper. If you were to only
marginally move the hand pad back and forth 1-inch forward and backward, any paint that was scrubbed from the surface would
for the most part linger under the paper, stuck between it and the paint surface. Eventually,the paper would clog with abraded paint residue, ceasing to sanding cleanly or efficiently. Certainly, the use of water to help rinse paint residue away would keep the surface and sandpaper mostly debris-free. If instead you went ahead and moved the hand pad back and forth 1-foot (using the same amount of strokes in the same amount of time), the abraded paint residue would be more apt to clear the area between the sandpaper and paint surface. Lots of motion means there's a better chance that any residue stuck on or stuck under the sandpaper will clear away.
A similar thing happens with large stroke machines when we buff paint using a foam pad and compound. Not only that, but with a larger stroke (all other things being equal) comes an increase in centripetal force (the force that causes the backing plate to rotate). The increase in stroke size and backing plate rotation makes it more difficult for debris to remain on the surface of the foam pad. This is particularly true when we're comparing residue build-up on foam pads versus pads that use strings (wool, microfiber, microfingers, cotton, etc.) With string-type pads, the individual string can trap the residue, the residue can clump the strings together, the string effectively become thicker, and voila!- We're seeing scour marks across the paint surface.
With foam, there's only so much that can be loaded into the pores immediately below the face of the pad or on top of the face structure of the pad. Sure, any particular foam pad might hold onto compound and residue more easily than another pad, but eventually, the thick layer of debris is going to break away from the foam, regardless its design. The debris will either be scuttled away via the pad's edge (effectively squeegeeing aside), or it will dust away, or it will be wiped away.
It's why many of us using the smaller Rupes LHR75 3" Air-Powered Mini Random Orbital just cannot believe that the paint surface is not hazed or scoured after we've polished using a dinky pad @ 8,000-10,000 RPM. It is a shocker, but what a difference there is between using it compared to a Griot's 3" machine or a Metabo SXE400.
