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I don't mean any disrespect but those scratches were caused by you rushing and not using the proper products.

You should never ever ever do any quick sanding. The wet sanding of our paint jobs is critical to getting a perfect finish. You should never need to use 800 on your top coat. Use 1500 at an absolute minimum (although you really would be better off using 2000) and wet sand slowly and carefully. You should also do all of your pre-detailing wet sanding in short straight strokes.

Proper detailing is very different to just polishing. Polish is designed to give a painted surface a depth of shine. After wet sanding you should be trying to remove all of the sanding marks on the paint surface. To do this you will need a cutting compound or a swirl remover. You should also follow a proper 'polishing' technique whereby you apply the product at low speed with a polisher and once it has been worked into the paint, then increasing the polishers speed and working in the product until most of the residue has been buffed away. Then you wipe away the remenants with a cloth.

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you can actually sand the surface with grits lower than 1500, depending on the compound you use. I have 1Z intensive paste, which actually removes sanding marks as low as 1200 grit. I sanded an area starting with 1000 grit, and worked my way up to 1500 grit, and the intensive paste worked the scratches off no problem. Compounds are normally used with rotary polishers to break down the abrasives in the product, but the instructions on my bottle of intensive paste said it was usable by hand, so I used the product with my porter cable with a yellow cutting pad, and the results came out great--no visible scratch marks after the product was worked in and broken down.

BTW---if anyone wants a really good rotary polisher for a cheap price, Harbor Freight currently has one of their polishers on sale for $29.99:

http://www.harborfreight.com/cpi/ctaf/displayitem.taf?Itemnumber=92623

I have one of these, and just bought another one because it's such a great tool. I actually learned to polish cars with this rotary, before purchasing/learning to use a Porter Cable 7336 heh... That's kind of bass backwards though: I would recommend any polishing newcomers to learn to polish with a PC first, since it is a polisher that is very easy to learn/master, and cannot burn through paint like a rotary can.

Here are some of the products I've used on my car so far:



following 1Z intensive paste with Optimum polish (with a white LC CCS pad, not shown) results in a great shine on Brightside black. I'd post some updated pics of my car but I noticed the bandwidth on my Godaddy account was getting sucked up by this website heh. Maybe when I'm just about done, I'll post more pics.