Advanced paint buffing for noobs?

I am 100% new to buffing out paint. I have watched youtube videos that seem to make it both easy and hard. Read a few articles that sounded like they were reciting the instruction booklet. I feel like I have the basics, but not really. I have 3 cars with oxidized paint, and 2 with peeling clearcoat, figured it was time. 

Is a $100 in hf equipment worth it? Will I burn holes in my paint? What happens to the messed up clearcoat?

I have one car and a few body panels for practice. Any help appreciated. 

Read the forums best you can, but it definitely one of those "learn by doing" sort of things.

• Clean clean clean!
• Start on light colored cars first since darker colors are a lot tougher to get good results
• Good lighting is key.
• Harbor freight DA polisher is decent but the pads suck.  Get some Chemical Guys pads or similar from Amazon.  Don't need to spend top dollar but spend more than HF.
• Start with Meguiars ultimate compound and go up or down from there.  UC will do 90% of cars "good enough" and provide a dramatic improvement.  

I'm no expert on buffing specifically but like everything else it helps to understand what's physically occurring so you can make that happen or know when it's going wrong. Sanding buffing polishing etc are all terms for using abrasives to remove material. The removing material thing isn't the goal but it's the means to the end. The end is to change the surface 'roughness' or texture of something. If you use a big enough magnification nothing is 'smooth', but if you're trying to make something shiny you're trying to get as close as possible. Since it's hard to add material and easy to remove it, pretty much all polishing is just trying to knock the peaks down to the level of the valleys by sanding off the peaks. Different abrasives have different 'grit' levels which is actually specified in sandpapers but is pretty vague in liquid abrasives like you would use in buffing or polishing. Probably to obscure how much tremendous overlap there is between products. Anyway the most time efficient way to do it is to use the coarsest abrasive appropriate to the amount of material you're trying to remove and then once you've removed enough material use finer and finer grits to remove the nasty sanding marks from the previous grit until you get to a point where sanding marks are barely visible, then finally to make it shiny.  Assuming you're working on intact clearcoat here. IF  you were trying to fix peeling clearcoat then you would actually have to leave the base coat at a texture level that the new clearcoat you were going to spray could adhere to it, and then polish the clearcoat to shiny. 

Knowing how rough of an abrasive to start with is the trick. You can start with finer grits and then step down to coarser as you realize that they aren't doing anything or that they're taking too long to do it and that's a safe if tedious way to learn. A 3000 grit pad is not going to burn all the way through a paint layer unless there's almost nothing there or you're pushing on it really hard or leaving it in one spot for a long time. So to the question of will you burn holes in your paint, the answer is if you're using a liquid abrasive (polish/compound/terms/terms/terms) then no you probably won't unless you're pushing too hard on a small section for too long of a time. The edges of panels and convex panel surfaces are the easiest places to go too far because the surface loading of the small area thats actually touching the abrasive will be much higher than on a flat panel,  so be careful in those areas.

If you want to start with something REALLY safe, start on plastic headlights. They don't really have 'layers' to worry about and are pretty thick so there's almost no risk of sanding 'through' anything important and you'll get a feel for things. Plus you can take them out and sit them on your lap to work on if you feel like it. 

The HF DA polisher is good for the buck.  Change the backing plate (usually aren’t flat out of the box) to a better one and buy a set of pads in different levels of softness off Amazon. 

Meguiar’s UC is a good recommendation. Keep in mind every car is different. If the UC grabs, gets sticky or acts up, switch to a different compound. I also like the 3m pro products.  Polish is for finishing after cutting with compound.  You may like the results well enough after just using compound.

Use only a very soft, preferably seamless, microfiber towel to remove dry product.  A regular cleaning microfiber is too coarse and will leave visible scratches.

You can make it more complicated, but this is all it takes to get a decent result and learn as you go.  Let us know how it goes, everyone likes before and after pics.