Gear Spotlight: Autoglym Super Resin Polish

 

Autoglym’s Super Resin Polish is a buffing polish which can be used to treat fine surface scratches, swirl marks, scuffs and minor paint stains. Polish like this is designed to be used after washing and drying the paint but before using a sealer like Autoglym Extra Gloss Protection or a finishing wax like Autoglym High Definition Wax. You could think of polish as an incredibly fine sand paper – by applying polish to the clearcoat layer of your paint, you’re essentially sanding (smoothing) out the blemishes in your paint by flattening out the paint surface and removing any embedded debris in the paint and creating a new, unblemished clearcoat surface.

 

 

We decided to put Autoglym Super Resin Polish to the test on some light surface scratching and see how it fared. Anyone who has owned a black vehicle can attest to this particular shade’s unforgiving nature when it comes to revealing blemishes in the paint and bodywork. This "before" shot actually looks worse than it is – it’s really just some fairly light surface scratching provided by way of a vicious English bulldog puppy attack:

 

 

Though the scratch was just deep enough to be detectable by rubbing a finger across it, we were confident this scratch was not all the way through the clearcoat, and thus was a suitable candidate for a buffing/polishing treatment to see how the product would fare.

 

Different severities of paint damage require different kinds of polishing/paint restoration products, and Autoglym’s Super Resin Polish falls somewhere in the moderate to light surface scratch removal paradigm. The benefit here is that while it may require more effort to remove a scratch than it might with some more drastic measures like rubbing compound or scratch removal kits, you also don’t run the risk of creating more swirls or scratches to fix, which can be a concern with more aggressive scratch treatment methods. Additionally, some scratch removal kits require a great deal of buffing once the scratch has been treated in order to bring the treated section back to the same luster as the area around it.

 

To that end, using the Super Resin Polish, not only were we successful in removing the scratch (at least to our untrained eyes), the polish is itself a buffing product, so there was no need to do follow up the scratch removal with an additional buffing step to bring the clearcoat’s luster back:

 

 

This is certainly not an instrumented test, and camera phone lenses and flashes can often provide somewhat dubious evidence. However we can sincerely attest to the fact that the scratch is now imperceptible from any reasonable amount of scrutiny. Our general rule of thumb is that, if you have to hunt for more than a few seconds to find a scratch, the scratch is essentially gone.

 

 

This section might be more aptly titled "Things To Be Aware Of" in this case, but in the interest of balanced reviewing, we’ll leave it as is. When using a polish, you should be aware of a few things:

 

– Make sure the surface you’re applying to the polish to is as clean as possible, otherwise you run the risk of damaging the paint further by rubbing foreign debris into the clear coat.

 

– As we mentioned earlier, different scratches require different types of product in terms of how aggressively they smooth out the surface of the clearcoat. While Super Resin Polish is capable of tackling anything from a barely perceptible swirl mark to a fairly hearty surface scratch, how long you will spend buffing the latter into submission is dependent on how bad the scratch is. If you’re an impatient type, or simply aren’t sure this will be capable of smoothing out more serious paint damage, you might opt for something like Quixx Scratch Remover – but be aware that the process with Quixx is significantly more involved than using a one-step treatment like Autoglym’s Super Resin Polish.

 

– While Autoglym’s Super Resin Polish will leave your clearcoat looking shiny and smooth, if you want it to stay that way, you need to remember that your clearcoat is now basically naked – there’s no wax or sealer protecting it from subsequent damage from exposure to the elements. To make sure your paint stays protected and maintains its luster, you’ll want to treat the polished surfaces with a sealer product like Autoglym Extra Gloss Protection or a wax like Autoglym High Definition Wax. It may sound like some sort of upsell to the uninitiated, but when you consider how layered paintwork is, as well as what is done to fix clearcoat damage (i.e. rubbing away the jagged parts of the scratch, as well as the surrounding surface layer of the wax/sealer/clearcoat), you’ll quickly realize that in order to protect the work that you’ve done, this last step is a vital one.

 

 

Autoglym’s Super Resin Polish works as advertised. Better than a multi-step scratch repair kit for light surface imperfections due to its one-step process as well as the great results, it also makes a great pre-wax surface preparation step to ensure the clearcoat you’ll be applying your wax or sealer to is in the best shape possible beforehand. As they say, the results speak for themselves.