I recently got a set of 3" buffing/polishing pads off Amazon and I need to get a better understanding about how to use them in general. If there's a tutorial out there that explains them I'd appreciate a link.

I don't have the chart in front of me right now, but I believe the instructions that came with them indicated the orange foam pad was for harder cutting, the blue and yellow foam pads would be for medium cutting/polishing, and the black and white foam pads are for fine polishing. Do all foam polishing pads follow this same color / grade code regardless of the manufacturer?

bradleyheathhays wrote:Do all foam polishing pads follow this same color / grade code regardless of the manufacturer?

No.

Nor are what they call hard, medium or soft necessarily equivalent.

Stick to brand name pads if you can. They perform better and last much longer. 3M are pretty good, albeit expensive but do come in a double sided variety that doubles the effective life (special fitting needed). Farecla are also excellent, as are those from Rupes. In Australia the Contour brand are my personal favourite even if their hard pads tend to disintegrate after some use. Lake Country are also pretty good, even if a bit dear here.

Above is for 180mm or 7" pads. For the smaller size, 90-100mm, I've used the Contour pads for around 20 years on a Cyclo twin head. The 3D purple pad is also outstanding for use on a mini rotary.

Don't buy pads on Ebay or Amazon unless known brands. I bought a set once and ended up with 5 different coloured pads that, other than colour, looked, felt and performed equally miserably.

I use a wool pad for most of the cuts and always use a black foam for final cut/polish. It takes out the swirl marks from the other abrasives. Most of the manufactures list black as the final but it's not always the case. The abrasive you use does most of the work so go from course to fine.