Count sections, not panels
Nobody polishes a door. They polish a two foot square of a door, then the next one. So the unit that predicts everything is the section, and the count comes straight out of the area divided by the section size — 120 square feet at two square feet a section is 60 sections. Two cutting passes over each is 120 section-passes, one polishing pass is 60, one finishing pass is another 60, and the whole job is 240 section-passes before anybody touches a machine.
Once it is written that way the estimate stops being a feeling. At the minute figures in the form the three stages come to 5 hours, 2 hours and 1 hour 30 minutes, which is 8 hours 30 minutes of machine time on a single car and no wash, no decontamination and no protection stage in that number at all.
The compound is not the expense
Those 240 section-passes drink 312 ml of product between them, which at the prices in the form is 31.92. The seventeen pads they wear out come to 34 dollars once each one is washed and used four times. Sixty-six dollars of materials against eight and a half hours of somebody standing there — and if you put any rate at all into the last field, the materials become a footnote.
The page makes this explicit at the bottom, where it prices one extra cutting pass. Sixty more section-passes is two and a half hours, 90 ml of compound and five more pads: nine dollars of product against ten dollars of pad wear, so with no rate entered the compound is 47 percent of what the pass costs. Put fifty dollars an hour into the last field and that share falls to six percent. That is the whole reason detailers argue about pads and machines rather than about compound.
Section size is the sensitive input
It appears on the bottom of the division, so halving it doubles everything. Working one square foot sections instead of two turns 60 sections into 120 and the machine time from eight and a half hours into seventeen. Nobody works the whole car at one section size — a hood takes big sections, a mirror cap and an A pillar do not — so the honest use is to run the flat panels at your real figure and accept that the curved parts of the car are worse than the average says.
What the page deliberately does not know
How many passes a car should get is not in here. That depends on what is in the paint, what the customer is paying for, and above all on how much clear coat there is to spend, which is a measurement rather than an opinion. Every cutting pass takes material that does not come back, and a panel that has been corrected twice before has already spent some of it.
The film budget belongs in its own arithmetic — film built, film removed per step, and what is left at an edge where there was less to begin with. This page counts the consumables and the clock, which is a different question and a much simpler one.
Questions people ask
How much compound does a full paint correction take?
On the figures in the form, 312 ml across all three stages for a 120 square foot car — 180 of compound, 72 of polish and 60 of finishing product. That is a bottle and a bit in total, 31.92 of material against eight and a half hours of machine time. Product is the smallest number in a correction estimate by a wide margin.
How long does a multi stage correction take?
The page multiplies it out rather than guessing. Sixty sections, two cutting passes at two and a half minutes each, one polishing pass at two and one finishing pass at one and a half, comes to 8 hours 30 minutes on the machine. That is machine time only: no wash, no decontamination, no taping, no protection stage and no breaks are anywhere in the figure.
How many pads do I need for one car?
It counts them from section-passes rather than from panels. At a pad swap every twelve section-passes on the cut, sixteen on the polish and twenty on the finish, the default job works through seventeen pads — ten on the cut, four on the polish, three on the finish. Washing and reusing them four times each turns that into 4.25 pads of actual wear, which is the number that costs money.
Does working smaller sections take longer?
Yes, and the relationship is direct. Section size is on the bottom of the division, so halving it doubles the section count and doubles every stage total with it. One square foot sections on a 120 square foot car is 120 sections and seventeen hours at the same per-section times. Most people work a mix, big on the flat panels and small everywhere awkward.
How many correction passes can my paint take?
This page has no idea and does not pretend to. Every cutting pass removes clear coat that does not come back, and how much is there is something you measure rather than assume — particularly at edges and body lines, where there was less film to start with and where a machine removes it fastest. The rub-out film margin calculator does that budget properly.