Rating Summary
“Good value, solidly built, good purchase.”
- Mr. Fix it, a DIYer, a Craftsman devotee
- Pros
- Great value, Came with several bonnets, Solid construction, Lightweight, easy to manuever., Came with a storage bucket.
- Cons
- Poor power cord design
Craftsman 10 in. Buffer/Polisher —
As the owner of a new Volkswagen GTI, it was pretty much imperative that I'd need something better than old towels and ripped up sweatpants to clean and polish my new ride. Before this I'd always owned used cars where appearance wasn't necesarily a priority (or even a requirement!) I'd been looking for a quality polisher/buffer so that I could clean up my last hand waxing job, as well as put a good shine on the car for a while to come.
I usually pull out the Sunday ads and flip through them, my girlfriend and I have a Sunday ritual where we pull all the ads up and divide them up: mine are tools, electronics, auto shops, and the like, she usually gets the homewares, clothing, and bedding ads. Ads like the Sears ads usually get pulled apart for this reason, I always manage to find the tool ads pretty quickly, if anything to drool over.
There wasn't any specific ads but I was reminded that my father had an old Craftsman buffer that was ancient and still in use so I decided to go down to the local store and peruse the selection to see which models were the spiritual successors to the one my father owns. There was a couple different models but the 10" kit stood out pretty much immediately. The reasons:
1.) It came in a bucket. Like a wide, oblong, paint style bucket, with a loop type carrying handle. That was important, so few power tools come with boxes or cases any more. This also ended up being handy because it was big enough to also keep my wax, buffing compound, and a few of the aformentioned cloths in as well.
2.) It came with bonnets. Three each of the applicator and 'cleaning' bonnets, plus one thick terry polishing bonnet. It meant not having to buy them up front at $10 ea. a set, which leads to the third point:
3.) Price. $55 or the buffer and the bonnets and the bucket. Which is reasonable considering that so-called "pro" units go for much higher prices and are essentially the same thing.
My first thought was that the bonnets were too tight for the wheel, but I quickly found that the wheel was pliable enough to compress a bit, enough for a fit that allowed the bonnet to remain snug on the wheel. You don't want a bonnet to wrinkle or be loose enough to come off, that traps debris or polish and can lead to swirls or damaging the buffer or the paint. In comparison to my father's unit, the casing is a good solid plastic (not metal) so that the buffer is light weight. You can tell there's some sort of compensation action at work internally because you can easily use the buffer even on a sloped hood with one hand (disclaimer: not that you should).
The handle runs almost all the way around the unit, so that you can use it comfortably in almost any angle or position, and has a coating or surface treatment (like cat's tongue) that makes very easy to grip and keep in hand. The power switch is in a convenient location, and makes a very satisfying clunk-click combination when using it, making sure you won't accidentally turn it on or off when you don't mean to.
The only complaint I have is the power cord. There is a short (6 inches or so) 'pigtail' with the standard male power plug end, it's chunky and beefy like the end of an industrial power extension cord with thick molded plastic. This also makes the end heavy. You have to use some Cirque de Soleil action to keep that heavy piece (and the attached extension cord plug) from bouncing off your freshly waxed paintjob. The pigtail is long enough to be convenient for all the time up to actually using the buffer, when you notice that it's just long enough to drag along the paint all on it's own, let alone with an extension cord attached. There's one of those velcro strap cord retainers on it, but it almost seems like an afterthought since it wasn't large enough to wrap around anything that would have kept the extension cord attached or the whole combination up and out of the way. I noticed nothing in the instructions about this loop or even a suggested mode of attaching the cord. After a couple minutes of playing with it I realized a quick and dirty solution was to wrap my extention cord around the handle with a quick over-under-through type look and plug the pigtail into that. Perhaps the type of hook or socket that electric yard implements have would have worked better in this situation.
Overall a great product. Feels solid, and was a great value. A minor design flaw is the only thing that kept me from giving it Five stars.
Craftsman 10 in. Buffer/Polisher
