Cleaning is often associated with maintenance and is definitely one of the main activities of detailing. From a maintenance perspective, this forms the first pillar of maintenance (followed by Nourishment – the second key pillar). Cleaning also tends to be the activity that more often than not consumes the most time.
Cleaning itself comprises 2 categories – Washing and Drying.
This post we focus on washing and detail some helpful tips that will assist you with this. To achieve better results, we need to understand the surfaces that you will encounter while washing your vehicle/marine vessel.
The Vehicle Vessels Surfaces
Vehicles/Marine vessels surfaces comprise many different types of materials ranging from painted surfaces through to matt plastics and glass.
This is important as different products will finish differently depending on the surface you are working on. A car body wash might not have enough grunt to clean off the caked on brake dust on your wheels.
Similarly, you do not want to use wheel cleaner on the more delicate rubberised window sills. Using the right type of cleaning product on the right surface will ensure that the surface not only is cleansed effectively but this will also prolong the life and appearance of that surface.
Paintwork
Generally is the most straightforward from a cleaning perspective. Attention needs to be paid to whether the surface has ceramic coat or wax/polymer sealant on it as the type of wash used can affect the durability of the protection on the surface.
All exterior washes sold by us are all pH neutral to ensure that there the layer of protection is not harshly degraded during the wash process. There are some washes that are also infused with Ceramic that will enable you to top up the ceramic coat on the surface of your vehicle while you wash.
Some surface contamination might be harder to dislodge such as road tar, tree sap and bug splatter. These different sources of contamination require more specialised cleaning products or they may end up damaging paintwork further (ie.acidic bug splatter or when using brute force trying to get tar/sap off).
Glass
Requires a separate cleaner as the key to maintaining glass is to ensure a streak free finish. The key to this is to use a dedicated glass cleaner as they contain small portions of alcohol within their formulation to aid in the drying process and prevention of the formation of large droplets that often result in water marks or streaks being visible after the drying process.
Wheels Cleaners
Wheel cleaners tend to be the harshest cleaners as a lot of the cleaners for wheels need to tackle the baked on brake-dust (iron dust) and road grime that etch themselves into the surface of the wheel.
The recommended cleaners we sell contain powerful iron removers in them to let the chemical reaction do the work for you as you spray on and watch the brake dust and road grime melt away so you end up scrubbing it 95% less.
Trim cleaners
Trim cleaners tend to have to deal with things like caked on polish residue. If the polish residue has not been soaked and dried within the pores of surface of the trim and even if it very slightly has, this can often be removed with our trim cleaners. These are formulated to pull the residual deposits out from the porous surface of the trim.
Vinyl
Vinyl is a popular and different surface to work with. Given it is essentially plastic and sticker glue, vinyl needs to be cared for differently. Our dedicated vinyl cleaners are formulated more gently to ensure that the vinyl applied is not harshly degraded over the wash process to prolong the life of your vinyl surface, be it wrap or sticker.
Attached here is a link to our cleaners that covers all surfaces previously mentioned.
