My first polishing experience

[samiam]

Well, I just spent a couple of hours on my first polishing experience. I had some problems at first... the polish was leaving behind lots of black spots (just as someone else reported in a recent post), but once the pad seemed to have a good amount of used polish on it, it started to work much better (just as someone had replied was the reason). After about an hour or so of fumbling around, I got a good hour of polishing done... half of the VS... and love the results! Some reflections after my first few hours of polishing:

1. I will never search the forums or ask how many passes of the F grade I should do. The answer is a lot. If you have to ask, you need more. :D

2. I will DEFINITELY be taking the advice of others in the future and polish the skins with F grade before riveting. Not a huge deal on the tail, but will save tons of time on the whole airplane. Cleaning the polish around the rivets is a bear, and the quality of the polish near the rivets is lower.

3. There is something oddly addicting/satisfying about it.

4. I think a long term love/hate relationship has begun.

Here's to many more hours....

[mike.smith]

I polished my whole plane with F-grade while all the skins were flat on the table, including the wings. Even though I had done my whole plane, I still went to the Nuvite demonstration at Airventure last summer. The thing I took away from it was even though I thought I was using just a "little" polish, the Nuvite guys used even less. Less is more. If you get a lot of black starting out (like I did) you are using too much.