OCDetails Detailing Blog

I have heard this for years that you can't remove swirls with a DA. There are clearly two camps that say either you can or cannot. Well, I'm in the camp that says if you can't remove swirls with a DA, then I wouldn't recommend trying with a rotary polisher because you clearly don't know what you are doing. Swirls can and will come out with a DA if you are using the right process and products. If you try to remove them with just a damp pad, then yeah... you'll have some difficulties. With my FLEX and XMT2 on a blue Edge2000 pad, these are some of the results I get.

(ignore the water streak)


The left part of this hood was polished and the rest is not yet.


Here is a good before/after on a nice Porsche.









This one is from some dog scratches on the door of an X5.




So just in case anyone ever tells you that in order to remove swirls you need a rotary, don't believe them. I don't even own a rotary because I've never run into something that I've needed it for. I guess on that last picture if I really wanted to get every last scratch out then I could have used a rotary, but it isn't like the dog isn't going to jump up on it again or that the car is going into a museum or something. lol For a daily driver I don't think perfection in the absolute sense is even a logical thing to strive for, but you can get close enough with a DA that 99% of people are going to think it is perfect. I guess I'm just not detailing the really nasty stuff, but I'd say that first picture was pretty nasty looking and it seemed to come out just fine with a DA. My motto is "You can do anything you know how to do." If you can't remove swirls with a DA, then learn.