Say Goodbye to Marble Etch Marks: Tips for Spot Polishing Like a Pro! #marblepolishingexperts

Hey everyone, this is Bob with Marble Polishing Experts. I've been online and I've been reading a lot about how people are suggesting to polish or spot what we call a spot polish your countertop or floor. Now what is the spot polish means that you have a polished counter but then you get a little bit of an edge mark somewhere on your counter especially if the light is hitting at just the right angle it will drive some people nuts and they really want to take care of that. Now it is a relatively easy thing to do if you understand what product you need and how you can do it. Let me just also say that if you have a large amount of edge marks all over your counter or all over your floor it's going to be very very tough for you to remove all of it. This is just for spot polishing. I've been reading online that you're supposed to use baking soda, chalk, ammonia, and all kinds of different silly stuff that they're recommending online and none of that stuff will work. These people are not marble polishers they're just copying articles from other people so you have to really be careful who you listen to. Now what are the equipments that you need? You need a polishing powder, you need water, you need a neutralizer, a rag, and you need a red pad like this. This is a 3m red pad. You're not going to be able to use any other pad. This particular pad has the right abrasiveness to do the job. Now this polishing powder that I'm using right now is not my usual polishing powder that I use out in the field. This is a very expensive polishing powder. Now what's different about this polishing powder? This polishing powder has a high amount of abrasive in there and very low acidity. Now why do you need those two ingredients in a polishing powder to make it a really good product for this application? The reason is because if your polishing powder is too acidic you're going to re-etch the marble. In other words, and I know this is counterintuitive because the acid from any liquid can interact with the calcium carbonate in the stone to etch it, right? That's how etch marks come about on your countertop and floors. Well polishing powders also have acids in them and those acids will leave etch marks if you do not know how to handle them. And this particular polishing powder has a low acidic threshold so it is less acidic than other polishing powders. Now another thing that this polishing powder has is a large amount of very good abrasive and abrasive is what actually is grinding into your counter so to say. It's helping you remove the etch mark. So if you don't have the right polishing powder the system that I'm about to show you is not going to work. If you want to buy this polishing powder I'm going to put a kit together and that kit is going to include the powder, it's going to include the neutralizer, and a red pack. Of course you can just get your own water. I don't need to send you water that's silly. All right so here's how we're going to do it. It's very simple but it's going to take a few times for you to do it before you kind of get a hang of it. So this is not something that you're going to be able to do the first time unless you get lucky. So my suggestion for you is to go somewhere and try to remove an etch mark that's not directly in the light. That way if you kind of mess up it's not going to be as visible. Okay so let's go through the procedure. It's pretty easy. We can see that this is the ring that we are going to remove right there. Okay now there are also some heavy etch marks over here. So if you have scratches in your marble the marble needs to be honed with an abrasive. That means that if you have scratches in your marble you're not going to get those scratches out from the marble. You really need a professional to do that. Now if you do have those very light etch marks you can remove them but sometimes those heavier etch marks are also going to be a problem. They're not going to come out as easy or you might be able to shine it up but you are going to be able to still see them. The ratio of water to powder is very important. If you have too much water you're not going to have enough powder to actually polish it. If you have too much powder you're going to go and burn the stone if you sit at it too long. And what is burning the stone? It means that it creates what we call an orange peel on the counter so that's going to also be visible. So there is a balance here that we have to maintain. The balance is between water, pressure and the amount of powder. If I want to take out this little bit of etch mark out I'm going to put a little bit of water, a little bit of powder. Now I have a little bit of powder on this pad already so I need to use less but if you have absolutely no polishing powder on this pad it's going to be really tough. Now this is my own marble table so I'm going to try to remove this etch mark. Circular motion, fairly fast. Now what you want to do is you want to check your work. You don't want to just keep going and going and going. You want to check your work and you're not going to be able to know if you did a good job until you completely dry the area up. So you have to make sure all the powder and all the surface is cleaned and dried properly otherwise you're not going to be able to see if the etch mark is gone or not. So here we're going to clean. Okay I don't know if you can see it but it's right there. It's a halo right there. So now you want to use a lot of water to equip through. The halo is still there so we need to keep going. We need to get that halo out but I'm not going to put any more powder on this because I don't want to get the surface any more acidic than it is and it's a good idea also if you're getting halos to use a little bit of got the halo out but as you can see it's a tricky kind of a thing to do. I've been polishing marble for 20 years and still I have to play with it to make sure I get it right and I'm very careful. I try to use as little powder as possible and test the marble. Now another thing you're going to run into is that this particular marble has a lot of calcium carbonate in it. Now how do I know that is because it is very very susceptible to etching. Now there are other like the marble that is in my bathroom you'll realize that you can do this for a lot longer and you will not get the halo because there is less calcium carbonate in that marble. So we're going to put a kit together for you with the red pad, polishing powder, and the neutralizer to give you everything you need to do a small job or to do spot polishing. Now the important thing that you have to know about neutralizer is that after you're done with polishing it is very important for you to neutralize. If you do not neutralize that polishing powder the acids from the polishing powder will remain acidic when it's dry on your table and then when you go to clean that surface you're basically activating that dry acid and you're leaving an acid mark or an etch mark in that same area. So neutralizing is very important, playing with it is very important, and it's kind of hard to tell but this is our coffee table so it has a lot of small scratches in it. None of the scratches came out because scratches need to be honed with an abrasive, a marble abrasive, a stone abrasive. That concept is very similar to a sandpaper but it's a sandpaper that's specifically made for marble. So that's the way you do it. Please do not listen to some silly people online who are telling you that baking soda can polish marble. Baking soda cannot polish marble at all. It can't do anything to it. All right I hope you guys learned something. You can go to marblepolishingexperts.com and you can buy this kit. I'm going to try to make it available as soon as possible for you guys so you can use it. If I don't have a kit available just contact me anyways. I will put something together and send it to you. All right thank you very much.