Motors Post your favourite detailing products, techniques and results

Nice job, glad to see you gave it a go in the end Mine has yet to be opened Work has been crazy for the past few weeks, no time for activities like detailing. I have two weeks off school for the Twelfth Fortnight, I'm taking the first of those to sort the car, it's going into the garage at our holiday house on Friday and I'll have until the following Friday to sort it - full correction and protection detail, right down to the nitty gritty stuff.

This is the oldest trick in the detailers handbook. Many pro's use regular dish soap to strip wax and sealant, even though there are "specially formulated" soaps out there for doing so. A popular one is Dodo Juice Lime Prime. I just use Fairy >.> There are a couple of synthetic sealants on the market now which are resistant to even Fairy - Our own local Orchard Autocare do one that can be washed with neat Fairy and still bead water like it was never touched!

To get a head start on next weeks big job, I took the battery, battery box and air box out of the car for a good clean over the weekend. I'll post more pictures later when I'm not uploading from a mobile connection, but let's just say they were filthy, as was what I found underneath My primary concern was getting the airbox flushed out because it had quite a bit of debris like small twigs and leaves in the bottom of it.

Clio engine bay sans battery box, air box, intake pipework etc:


There's going to be a huge update to this thread over the next couple of weeks - I plan on taking pictures of the whole process next week. I just need Elite Car Care to get my order through ASAP so I have the tools and products necessary to actually do the work!

 

Seeing this thread pop up again after not visiting the general section for a while I had to shed a single tear for my poor usually filthy Focus.

Since we moved here I haven't been able to do anything on my car, in the past 20 months I have only been able to clean my car every so often as I need to head to my parents to do it. Living in a 3rd floor apartment is no good for car care

We will hopefully be buying a house in the next 18-24 months so I will start over again there probably with a new/newer car. My car is over 10 years old and the paintwork had seen better days before I even started to look after it, it is currently very clean right now but most of the time it is bloody filthy aside from a few spots where I have cleaned away bird poop.

I promise to give it a thorough clean, clay bar, polish and wax before the Autumn comes.

 

Yep, much-needed. I did the insides of the front wheels last week - after attacking them with degreaser (a CV joint on the driver's side had a bit of a weep, so a fine drizzle of grease was all over the inside of the rim), the Iron-X got them looking fantastically clean. I've given them a serious wax now (a boatload of the Poor Boys that I bought, it's lasted really well), so hopefully they'll stay a bit cleaner. I may fork out for some G-Techniq C5 this month then I don't have to re-wax them. We'll see.

p.s. Good luck!

 

It's funny you should mention a weepy CV boot! I dealt with something similar which also made a nasty mess. More on that after next week

Speaking of Gtechniq C5, ECC called me earlier to say they'd run out of Wolf's Nano Glass for my order, so I changed it for a Gtechniq G4 & G5 kit instead. It'll be the first of their products I'll have tried but then again so will the Wolf's hard body protectant.

Wheel wise I'm giving mine the IronX and Poorboy's treatment next week - they're not bad at the moment because I had it on the lift for a day a while ago and took the opportunity to remove and clean them. Because I didn't have the IronX at that point to get the worst of the baked on brake dust off, I just sealed them with some Meguiars Gold Class paint wax which I didn't like on the paint compared to Colly 476S (lasted about 6-8 weeks then stopped beading, Collinite lasts ~6 months between top-ups).

I'm on the prowl for a set of decent 16" Canasta's - same wheel as my old Dynamique S had - to change the 15s for. A slightly lower profile tyre and more wheel should look better. I like the Del Arte rims, they're just an inch too small!

 

I'm a meguirs man

Sent from my GT-I9505 using Tapatalk 2

 

The majority of my products are still Meguiars, but I also have a wide range of products from other brands like Zaino, Collinite, Auto Finesse, Autoglym etc. I plan on taking a photo of everything for the 'post your setup' thread on Detailing World sometime which I'll also post here

 

Hah, CV grease is a nasty bugger. I had one split completely last year, and all the suspension components, wheel arch and wheel were absolutely coated... Cleaned it up, then the replacement went a bit weepy, the new one is, so far, nice and solid. Driveshafts are a consumable on this car tbh - they aren't the replaceable CV type!

I think we've got crossed paths, as the Gtechniq windscreen kit is something I want to try as well - a broken washer pump over winter and 15 years of hard living means my screen is rather badly scratched. I'm tempted to get a new one though to be honest, it's only £60 excess! It's got a nasty chip in the MOT fail zone as well, although none of the testers have picked up on it.

 

I picked up some Viro-Sol today for wheel cleaning. 5 litres for just under 7 quid.

10:1 concentration, so I've got somewhere near 50 litres of the stuff to play with. Beats paying about a tenner for less than 1 litre of specialist wheel cleaner in a spray bottle.

http://www.ttforum.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=115764&sid=c362aceab27bd559f94eabe0d091ac40

 

Sounds like good stuff, I'll grab some for future use. For the record the Iron-X was my last resort to shifting burnt-in brake dust from 12+ months of neglect. It's hideously expensive, but worth it for the results. Autoglym, Carplan and a no-name wheel cleaner made no difference what-so-ever to it.

 

Well, the good thing about Virosol is you can vary the concentration depending on how tough the grime is to get rid of. Recommended seems to be 10:1, but I've seen quite a few use it at 1:1 concentration with water.

 

Yep, I plan to use it as an all-purpose cleaner in various concentrations- it says it's good for grease, so ideal for cleaning arches and underbody etc.

 

Nice tip about Virosol Tim! I joined Cliosport last week and they have a detailing section where I found this:

Perm solution used as wheel cleaner

It was also linked to on DW:

Clicky

Sounds interesting, but I think I'll stick to the professionally formulated IronX for now! I used it for the first time today - what an awesome product!

 

What polish and pad combo's are you guys using I'm a tad baffled by the choice and order your supposed to use them?

Gotta say IronX is great!

 

For me, a full range (white, yellow, black etc) of Menzerna foam pads plus several of both cutting and finishing (closed and open cell) microfiber pads. Full five stage range of Menzerna polishes from 500 grit compound all the way up to super finish 4500 grit polish.

Search for 'Junkman2000' on YouTube and watch his 'machine polishing for beginners' series. It's a great guide for someone confused by the massive range of polish and pads available.

I can also highly recommend the Auto Finesse Revitalise System. A "new to detailing" friend of mine recently bought this and with some pointers from myself, polished his tired, dull looking Megane to near perfection in one weekend. All it needed was a good claying, some tar removal and straight in with the three step AF kit. There are some deep scratches that it didn't get out, which a coarser compound might have removed, but he says it's still the best £80 he's ever spent on the car because of the difference it made. All of the Auto Finesse products that I've used so far have been great. They're fast becoming one of my favourite brands even though they are a little on the pricey side compared to others.

 

Depends a lot on what type of paint you have. What car is it? If it's medium paint then Hex Logic Orange/White/Black along with Megs 205 and 105 polish is probably all you'll need. If you have harder paint then you might need to step up to a heavy cut pad (yellow).

 

I'm afraid I massively underestimated how difficult it is to accurately photograph and demonstrate paint swirls, scores and scratches going into my week+ long detail. I have no doubt whatsoever that my lack of skills in taking photographs of any sort with a DSLR is contributing heavily to my failed attempts at taking clear before/after paint correction shots, but I've learned that 90% of the problem with my paint is swirl marks and scoring that are too light to pick up on a photograph under halogens or an LED light. It's even proving quite difficult to see them between polishing stages, but most of all it's fairly impossible to get them to show on camera without a 3M Sun Gun or some metal halide lamps. The dents, deeper scores, scuffs etc are showing up fine, but I've spent enough time experimenting with capturing the lighter defects and unfortunately I have to give up trying. The work log will be a little lighter on paint correction photos than I had hoped, but at this point I really want to get it finished more than I want to photograph the process in painstaking detail.

 

How do you know if your paint is medium or hard?

 

Ironx is good but dam it stinks :what:

sent from me phone

 

I can't argue with you there, it is certainly the foulest smelling product in my arsenal to date. It also dries your skin out like nothing else I use for the car. If my hands weren't so used to it with Flux cleaner and Isopropanol every day, they might have been a bit worse for wear after two days of wheel cleaning!

 

Can anyone recommend a good basic starter kit for detailing? Not sure this is going to be a hobby kind of thing like it is for osme people, but my car really needs a bit of TLC.