Well, I don't care what anyone says, wool pads just work better for taking out scratches than the foam pads. At least for me. I wound up using a wool pad on the Porter-Cable and had it cranked up to max speed and it really helped to take out a lot of the smaller scratches. Only problem was that the vibrating machine just KILLED my hands. I had to put on work gloves to try to reduce the vibration getting to my hands, but still, I had to quit before my hands got wrecked. As it is my hands feel more like claws than hands today. I probably could have worked on the car for another week or three, but honestly, I just got tired and pretty much worn out doing this. But at least I lost three pounds in the process. This IS work!
To add insult to injury, yesterday I waited till it clouded up outside and then pulled the car out of the garage so I could wash off all that buffing compound splatter that had gotten everywhere. I worked as quickly as I could, but I STILL got water spots on the hood. And they were pretty tough to get off with the finer polish I was using at that step, so that tacked another two hours onto the work I was doing. Maybe it was because the paint had no protection at all on it that made those water spots so tenacious, but I was pretty surprised at the difficulty getting them off. So I was working on it till midnight last night, trying to get the car ready for the car show today (which was a wash out for me anyway due to the weather).
So when the smoke cleared, what I learned was that wool pads with the System 51 polish just worked the best on getting out scratches.
I think my Harbor Freight rotary buffer is about ready to give up the ghost, as it smells funky like the windings are burning up in it. It wound up being the workhorse in this project, though. The Porter-Cable random orbital will work OK at the highest speed with a wool pad. I didn't really use the Flex dual action orbital very much to get much of an opinion of it. It's sort of a cross between a random orbital and a rotary buffer, so I would expect the results gotten using it to be somewhat in the middle of those two types of machines.
Sanding by hand is problematic as it seemed to generate it's own set of scratches if you are not real careful. Not sure if my technique needs work because of the way I held the sanding block, or the type of block I used was not optimum, or I used the sandpaper longer than I should have. Or maybe all of those problems conspired against me. Experience DEFINITELY counts in this. But apparently you do take some knocks to the nuts getting there.
Dr Colorchip and the Langka solvent will work pretty well on rock chips, but it appears that it can be tough doing this work when associated with any other paint work you want to do. Or if you have too many defects to deal with, it can just flat out wear you out trying to tackle them all. I had trouble filling in chips with either color or clear to get the paint to stay flush with the rest of the paint surface. Sometimes working on one chip would wash out the paint on another chip or three that were too close to the one you are working on. I couldn't get those products to work very well to fill in scratches at all. Again, maybe it's just an experience or and technique thing. It will take time and a gentle touch, evidently.
Right now the car looks pretty good from 6 feet away. Get any closer and the scratches and rock chips get to be visible. Had I known it was going to rain like hell today and I wouldn't be going to the car show in Tallahassee, I probably would not have put on the sealant last night so I could putter around with the Langka solution to try to get the technique down to fill in those chips and scratches. But perhaps some other time. I want to get back to just driving the car and poking around with the tuning stuff. Plus I'm not sure how much more my back could take leaning over the car to do this stuff.
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