Product Review: Sonax CutMax
by Ivan RajicCutMax was designed to remove heavy imperfections while finishing down extremely well! The highly corrective paste formula helps remove up to 1500 sanding marks and other heavy imperfections from severely weathered paint with ease. CutMax is water-based which allows for a long working time and it will not dry out like other compounds. This means dust free polishing so you don’t have to clean up that annoying dust! After application, simply wipe off the polished area with a clean microfiber towel and you’re done. Even though you will have a great deal of gloss left behind, you still may need to follow up with a lighter polish. If this is the case, the Sonax EX 04-06 is a perfect follow up to remove the haze and finish the paint down. This unique polishing formula is solvent, silicone, and petroleum free, making it body shop safe. If you are looking for a great heavy cutting polish, the Sonax CutMax is a great choice!
We got to test CutMax a month or so ago and I wanted to share some thoughts. The test car was my 2004 Toyota Matrix that serves as a shop car for us as well as testing grounds for anything and everything. It only seemed fitting to test this out on parts of it and see how it performs. We decided to test it on my driver side door, which wax first poorly washed in order to cause a bunch of swirl marks and marring. By poorly washed, I mean we took a dirty microfiber towel, sprayed it with ONR and then wiped off a ton of dirt! Not a great idea normally, but for testing purposes it was perfect as it led to this…
So we decided to use a LC purple foamed wool pad with the Flex 3401 to see what happens…
After a bit of work, we got the following…
As you can see, there is expected haze, which I assume is from the pad itself since it’s fairly aggressive for this paint. Otherwise, the CutMax worked very well and I believe it finished down really well for a compound that provided such good correction. In the following photos, we went over the same section with Sonax Perfect Finish and a white LC pad, which left a perfectly glossy finish…
For those wondering, yes there are very deep swirls left over on the side we polished. This paint is and always has been extremely beat up, so it would need a couple compounding stages to remove most or all of the deeper stuff. However, since we test stuff on it all the time, we try to limit the amount of polishing as much as possible and avoid a trip to the body shop for paint work :).
Back on topic… Sonax CutMax is definitely a great product that I see us using regularly. On medium to soft paint such as this one, it will perform very well at correcting the paint and leaving a finish that’s easily refined with a quick pass with any finishing polish. I believe when used with foam pads it will leave a great finish and on some harder paints may even be considered as a 1-stage polish to both correct and leave a great finish.
I will update the thread if we have any new findings or tips with CutMax as we gain more experience with it, but for now I definitely plan on using it on a regular basis!
Thank you for taking the time for this review Ivan. I was wondering if you know if the abrasives are DAT or SMAT?