I recently decided to compare two of the more popular compounds on the market today, the Menzerna FG400 and Meguiar’s M100. We normally use these two, along with M105, for corrective polishing, so I wanted to do a demo on soft black paint and show how they stack up against each other.
The testing was done on a hammered jet black Tesla S… You can even see the horrible marring and spotting on the edge of the trunk without any spotlight on it. It was that bad!
As you can see in the photo above, I used the Flex 3401 Polisher and an Orange Lake Country Pad. The FG400 accomplished great correction with the orange pad and made a huge improvement overall with only really deep scratches remaining.
As expected, the polish left some micro-marring in places…
Some heavier defects and micromarring showing in the paint…
M100 also did a great job. Comparing the two, I think M100 corrected more of the deeper swirls…
But it also left more micro-marring compared to FG400 from what I could see…
Overall, both products are great and I will keep using both products. I think the FG400 finishes down better and will have it’s use over something like M100 or more aggressive compounds. Similarly, M100 can usually correct better due to the abrasives that you can work longer, but still leave a fairly decent finish. The micro-marring shown in the photos above can easily be removed by a finishing pad/polish combo, such as a Crimson Lake Country Pad and M205 or SF4500. Also, to properly correct the paint above (probably with only 2 stages of polishing), I would’ve most likely ended up using a more aggressive pad for compounding so as to correct a bit more of the deeper defects before finish polishing.
I think at the end of the day it will depend a lot on personal preference as well as paint type when choosing between the two products, but I can’t say either one is better than the other. We have run into paint such as this Tesla that’s extremely sensitive where using M100 with an aggressive pad may cause so much marring that it would require a middle step between compounding and finish polishing. In that case, FG400 is a better option due to it’s finer finishing ability. The opposite can be true for harder paints.
Bottom line, as I said above, both products are great and come highly recommended.
