Looking good Rebecca.
How are you finding the Meguiars Microfibre system? I've read some user reviews where they've said it's easy to use, the results are very good, but the main downside is the pads get clogged up with polish quite quickly. Will be interested to hear your thoughts, along with the obligatory pictures of one flawless, very shiny black R when you've finished
I think it's a great system, and much prefer it to my previous foam pads/polish set up. It can be as simple as you want, or you can mix it up with other beloved polishes, so simple but versatile at the same time. I won't go bad to foam pads now. I really wanted to use it as it was designed this time round, - a 2-stage using both the D300 and D301. And I was interested to see if there was any discernable effect on the orange peel, as it's ability to flatten paint has been documented. I think there is a very subtle improvement - I did a close visual comparison of one polished door compared to unpolished adjacent door and looked a tad flatter to my eye - don't think it's my imagination, lol. The D301 finishing wax lays down a protective layer of wax but this will be panel wiped off today to make way for some Swisswax wax.
The cutting compound on the cutting pad is quite aggressive and may be too much for some softer paints, in which case you could use cutting compound on finishing pad, them move onto the finishing compound. But I find DBP paint to be quite hard paint, so it can take a reasonable amount of polishing, and 2-stage was fine on it. On average I did 3 passes with the cutting pad/polish (speed 4 - moving DA slowly with moderate pressure for 2 passes and then lighter pressure for final pass) and same with the finishing pad and polish (speed 3 - faster pace but still moderate pressure). Firstly, I tried a quarter of the bonnet with just the finishing pad and it was pretty decent result but there was room for improvement (imo) and so I did next section with cutting pad/D300 and then refined it with Finishing Pad and D301 to see difference and was sold, but it would also work very well using Meguiars 205 finishing polish too, and I'm going to test that on a couple panels today. All in all it's a fantastic DA system, and I can recommend.