One of the most powerful cleaning tools in your garage should be a good steam cleaner. Not only is it great for cleaning interior surfaces like carpets, leather, vinyl, and fabrics it can also be useful for exterior cleaning. I use it on deep contamination of fragile paint; cleaning under the hood and cleaning in …
This Z8 seemed to clean up well with just a washing, but the paint felt like sand paper. Not sure if it was covered with tree sap or what, but it took clay bar, compound, and multiple passes with polish to remove. The 23 year old paint was thick but hard. I used Meguiar’s M105 …
If you have a car that you take to the track often, you know how hard it is to remove the rolled-up rubber marks you get on the exterior. They don’t often damage the paint, they just require some intense polishing to remove. And that’s the risk: If you aren’t careful with the polishing, you …
Sometimes there’s just nothing left to polish. This is especially true with cars from the 90’s. When the auto industry switched over to water-based clear coat paints, many of the earlier products started to fail before the new-car warranty even expired. The other area which caused problems was in door jams and trunks. The flexible …
In a previous blog post, I mentioned that my core service is a detail with ceramic coat, which I offer at three service levels: good, better, and best. Since I’m working mostly with cars that are drivers, it makes no sense to do a concourse-level detail. That said, some cars do need more attention than …
As a general rule, I try to do minimally invasive work, only removing enough paint to get the desired level of shine and clarity before coating. But occasionally there isn’t anything to work with as was the case with this fender flair. A good bit of paint was scraped off down to bare metal which …
I recently had another E36 M3 in the shop for to detail for resale. A preservation detail can really help a car “pop” and make a solid first impression for any potential buyer. It also helps ensure that the condition they see is more than just temporary as is common with many used car dealers. …
This is a 200K mile X5 we had in the shop this week for a detail and ceramic coating. White paint is tough. You wash it and it looks white. You clay bar it and it looks white. You polish it and your pad is filthy, and it looks white. But then when you ceramic …
This is perhaps my favorite type of project, the preservation detail. You find a complete car that’s been abandoned in a garage or barn. It may not run and has been off the road for years. You want to clean it up, get it running and then decide what to do with it. Is it …