Car Care Advice

Maintaining black paintwork can be a bit of a handful. Black cars show the dirt, so you have to wash them often. They also show swirl marks really badly, and unfortunately, washing results in swirl marks… it is inevitable I’m afraid.

As we always say, you cannot remove dirt without agitation… what this means is that you have to use a wash mitt, brush etc. to move the dirt and loosen it. You cannot simply point a hose pipe (or pressure washer) at it and expect it to fall off. The problem is that when you agitate the dirt on your paintwork it will scratch it. And it’s these tiny scratches that you see as swirl marks.

So if you have a black car, the first thing to do is be we aware that you are going to have to take your wash regime seriously if you want to avoid swirls. (In fairness, most people couldn’t give a monkey’s about avoiding them. After all, walk down any street looking at the cars and swirl marks are the norm.  It’s only those of us who want our car in show condition that would worry about it).

I personally wouldn’t have a black or dark coloured car without a paint sealant. A sealant makes the paintwork slightly harder, reducing swirls, and it also makes it smoother meaning that dirt has less to cling to… which means less washing, which means less swirl marks.
When washing, you want to move as much dirt as possible before going anywhere near it with your wash mitt. Start off my soaking the car with water using a hosepipe or similar.
There are soap products on the market (for trade) that will remove most dirt without agitation, but these are strong soaps and they streak. They can even cause damage to metal trim such as that found around windows. But you could find a fairly strong soap, just keep in mind that it will require more rinsing. You can get a pump up spray from the garden centre for about £10 that would allow you to apply your soap without having to sponge it on.

A little trade secret here is not to be fooled into thinking that more bubbles means a better soap. It doesn’t! Try and find a low foaming soap, they usually work better on cars and have the added advantage of letting you see what you are doing. Unfortunately, most retail products produce loads of bubbles — they make them that way because that’s what the public expects.
A pressure washer is very useful at this stage. Although the kind you get in B&Q are not much good as they are all pressure and no water volume. A commercial pressure washer like the kind you find at a service station will put out about 5 times more water which is what you really need to  knock all that grit off. So it might be worth going to the garage for your initial wash. Go around the car paying special attention to the lower half. The aim here is to knock as much of the dirt and grit off as you possibly can.

The nest thing you may want to do is go around the car with a traffic brush…
“A brush?” I hear you say, “Are you mad?”.
The kind of brushes that you can get from Vikan or Arnold are really soft like a baby’s hair brush. Trust me, you would have no problem taking one of these into the shower with you… which is the test to go by. If you don’t want swirl marks, don’t use anything on your car that you wouldn’t use on yourself.
I suggest using the brush because it can get into the areas where a wash mitt won’t go. And if you use it gently… just a tickle, the bristles will push past grit rather than pushing down onto it. And of course, it won’t trap dirt, especially if you do this under running water.

Once you have done this, pressure wash the car again taking care to get the dirt our of all those corners and hard to see places (or else you will pay for it later), and then you can go over it with your wash mitt working from the top down.
We always tell people to use plenty of water, but it’s all the more important with black cars — you want to wash the dirt away from the car, NOT scrub it off.

The afore mentioned sealant is going to help keep the swirl marks at bay, but an extra coat of wax will add to this. It’s good to keep the car well waxed because the glossier the car is, the less often it will need cleaning and the easier the dirt will come off. Little and often is the key here.

…and yet, chances are that you will still get swirl marks. I know that this question was about removing swirls, but I’m not going to cover that yet, because once you have a few, the best thing to do is to hide them. As I said, they are inevitable, so it’s best to learn how to live with them or otherwise you’ll be trying to remove them every time you have washed your car. The best way to hide them is to use a wax product that contains diffusers and fillers. To some degree, most retail products have them, but some like AutoGlym’s Ultra Deep Shine contain a lot, and this product is fantastic on dark coloured cars. It doesn’t usually make them invisible, but it does reduce them and make them far less noticeable.

As for removing swirl marks? Don’t try!
If you can’t live with your swirl marks, then get a professional to remove them. Don’t think its going to be something you can do yourself. A hand polish won’t do it, to remove them you will need to buff the car or machine polish it — that’s all fine and dandy, there are plenty of enthusiasts doing this with their Porter-Cables, and I’m sure they manage fine. Removing the swirl marks is the easy part. The problem is that you are then left with buffer marks, also called holograms. These are really fine scratches, even finer than swirl marks.

I was talking to a fella not so long ago, he said he machine polished a black car and got it ready for the customer to pick up next morning and it looked wonderful. But the next morning the car looked dreadful and was covered in these smudge-like marks. This is a typical story that I hear often. Two things happened overnight. Firstly the light changed revealing holograms he couldn’t see the night before. Secondly, the product he used evaporated or at least settled. The polishes and compounds he had used (which were of the finest quality) contain siloxane as a lubricant. But it also filled the buffer marks effectively hiding them. Less than 12 hours later the buffer marks re-appeared.
Of course, you can just hide them using the kind of product I mentioned earlier, but it seems that the kind of people who want to buff their own cars want perfection, and if the light is harsh, you will be able to see the holograms. You will end up chasing perfection forever… that way lay insanity.
You are unlikely to ever be able to see buffer marks on a silver car, but black and dark coloured cars are another story. The only way to completely remove them is to use progressively finer polishes and pads. This takes a lot of equipment, a lot of money, lots of time and lots of skill. It’s a road only the very most dedicated enthusiast should start down… some things are just best left to professionals.

The best car colour is almost certainly silver. Swirl marks hardly show, in fact, dirt and dust doesn’t show so much as it has nothing to contrast against.

The worst colour is probably black or anything that is really dark. Most of the dirt on your car is fairly light in colour and so contrasts against dark coloured cars. And any swirl marks catching the light are easily seen on a dark car.

If you have your heart set on a black or dark blue car, I’d recommend getting paint sealed straight away. Throw away any washing kit you have and buy new gear, and buy the right gear. Follow Anna’s article on how to wash your car, so you can keep it clean while getting the minimum of scratches, and also buy yourself something like AutoGlym Ultra Deep Shine to help hide any scratches you do get.
Stay away from automated car washed and don’t drive through any hedges.
Dark coloured cars may be murder to keep clean, but they don’t half look good when they are clean and polished!

Yes, some waxes are better for light or dark cars. Some will even tell you on the back of the bottle.

That was the simple answer, read on if you want to know why.
Some people think that the more wax you put on a car, the more glossy it will be… this isn’t actually the case. If you put 20 sheets of glass in front of a mirror, would it make it more reflective? Of course not. The reflected light would have to fight it’s way through all that glass and all it’s impurities, and wax isn’t nearly as clear and pure as glass!

So on your car, much of the reflected light is going through the wax, not just bouncing of of it. If you polish a car you can make it really shiny without the need of a wax, and in such a case what you want is a wax that goes on really thin, is really clear and doesn’t interfear with the reflected light. However, this isn’t a perfect world and not all cars are polished to a high degree. So what you get are micro-scratches that are caused by bits of grit scraping the paintwork as you are washing (See picture left). These can be much improved by using a wax that contains fillers and diffusers such as AutoGlym Ultra Deep shine. Fillers fill these scratches, but they still let light pass through - so these micro scratches will still catch the light. Diffusers refract the light and scatter it in all directions and this makes these micro-scratches far less noticable. However, this is the exact opposite to what were saying was the ideal… a wax which doesn’t interfear with the light and so gives clarity of reflection. Waxes with diffusers won’t look quite as shiny and glossy as those without. So you see, it’s a trade off.

What does this have to do with light and dark cars? Not much really, except that dark coloured cars show micro-scratches and other imperfections more than light coloured cars. So you are more likely to want a wax which contains a diffusers on a black car than you are on a silver car. On a brand new car, or on a car which is cared for and reguarly polished, you won’t want diffusers even if the car is black.

What is a clay bar?

Clay bars seems to be the big thing at the moment, everybody is talking about them, which may explain why there are so many misconceptions about them! Hopefully I can clear up a few things in this article.

The story goes that some Japanese chap discovered that he could take riverbed clay and clean his car with it… however, you are unlikely to find a real clay bar on the market. The ones you can buy are plastic and pretty much made of the same stuff as Blu-tac, only blended to be stickier and harder. The basic idea is that you rub it over your car’s paintwork and the stickiness sucks up any contaminates such as raildust, fallout, overspray and organic matter. So it does ‘clean’ your paintwork, but some people are under the misapprehension that it will polish paintwork and can be used to remove swirl marks and scratches - it doesn’t.

Can they harm my car?
If you don’t use them properly - you bet they do! You are rubbing them reasonably firmly all over your car, so if you get any bits of grit in them they will cause scratches. You have been warned!
The first rule of using a clay bar is not to use it until you have got your car really clean, I mean really clean! Don’t cut corners, clean right under those sills, all the shuts and panel lines, gutters, trim, everything! Many people take great care not to drop the claybar on the floor (which is rule two) only to pick up a bit of grit which was sitting in some nook or cranny on their own car. They then proceed to rub this all over the paintwork and wonder where they went wrong.
Rule two is to take great care never to drop it on the floor. Any dirt and grit there will stick to it and stay in the clay. There is no point in trying to pick it out, it isn’t worth the risk - throw the clay bar in the bin.

As you use your clay bar, it will pick up dirt and grit, but this is okay, this stuff is so small it will cause minimal scratching. In theory, at some point the clay bar will get so full of dirt that it will need throwing away… but I have known this to happen because somebody always drops it on the floor before then! They last for ages and are a really good investment (unless you have butter fingers).

Clay bars come in a variety of different grades, many manufacturers producing 3 or 4. But most of these are professional use, being medium and heavy duty for removing serious fallout prior to buffing a car. The ones most commonly aimed at the general public are very soft and designed not to damage paintwork and are good for general cleaning of paintwork. When using them for heavier duty contamination removal, it is sometimes unavoidable to scratch the paintwork and doesn’t matter much to the professional as they will have the tools for removing light scratches.

But you don’t need to be a professional valeter to make use of a clay bar. There is all sorts of stuff that gets onto your paintwork and sticks there, from road salts, lime scale, soot, light metal fallout and organic material such as squashed bugs and tree sap. A claybar will remove the stuff that a sponge or wash can’t– If you try it you will be amazed, both by the stuff on the claybar and how smooth your paintwork feels.

How to clay bar your car.

First I recommend getting a bucket of warm water. The bucket needs to be spotlessly clean (no grit in it!), and the water needs to be nearly hot, this is because you put the clay bar in the bucket to let the water soften it. Once you have left it for a minute, take it out and knead it into a ball and then flatten it so you have a palm sized disk. Some people cut theirs into slices and use only a bit at a time… I have no idea why they would do this, it seems silly to me. Just use the whole lot in one go.

If you buy a clay bar, detailing clay or paint eraser, it will probably come with a bottle of clay lubricant, you can use this by spraying first the clay bar (so it doesn’t stick to your hands, and then on the part of the car you are going to clean. If you didn’t by a clay bar aimed at the retail market, then you can buy clay lubricant… but frankly, You don’t need it. I had a conversation about this the other day with a manufacturer, they told me that the clay lube does contain lubricants and some wax to help shine things up a bit, but really its nothing special, normal car shampoo (mixed with water according to the instructions) will do just as well, but the manufacturers feel compelled to provide a lubricant in order to ensure that you have something that won’t react with the detailing clay. Some soaps and detergents can cause a breakdown of the clay bar, so ensure you use a shampoo as these are PH balanced and suitable for cars and clay bars.

When you start off pushing the claybar across your paintwork, you will at first feel a slight resistance. This may because the claybar isn’t yet flat, and it may be because it is sticking against the fallout. but once you have made a few strokes, it will get going and you will feel the difference between dirty paint and clean paint that the clay bar glides smoothly over. I suggest that you move the bar in straight lines back-and-forth, you don’t need to press hard, in fact it’s better if you don’t, that way you can feel better. They say that you can tell when the paint is clean because you will hear it… it is literally squeaky clean - but this isn’t always the case. Check the bar often to see how dirty it is, check for anything that looks like grit, and check the paintwork for scratches. Once you have done a couple of square feet, fold the claybar in on it’s self, roll it up into a ball and flatten it again, and start with a clean face. This will minimize the chances of grit and dirt in the claybar damaging the paintwork. Every now and again, you feel a bit of resistance which is caused by some fallout, and although you might not be able to see it you know there is something there- once it’s gives way and has been sucked up by the claybar, fold it up again incase it was something that could scratch. Keep the car, the bar and your hand lubricated at all times, it will make things easier.

If you have a light coloured clay bar, you will be able to see all the crud that is coming off really clearly. I have covered fallout and raildust in other articles, but much of the stuff you are seeing is just everyday grime from pollution that normal washing can’t remove. This stuff harbours all sorts of acids, salts and other stuff which is harmful to your car. Unfortunately, car paintwork is porous, so you are only removing the rubbish from the very surface, which is why we always recommend applying a sealant such as Supagard or Diamondbrite to your car from new.

Once you have clay bared your car rinse it off. You will probably want to polish it, and you will certainly want to wax it, but you will now notice that the car is silky smooth.

Raildust is the common name given to ferrous metal fallout contamination. Often raildust comes from trains and is caused by the train’s wheels on the rails, the electrical pick-up rubbing overhead cables and the effect of the braking mechanism causing tiny particles of metal to fly off into the air. However, this kind of fallout can be caused by any mechanical device that involves metal on metal, including your own car’s brakes. Exhaust fumes will contain some amount of metal, especially from ships and aircraft, foundries and factories. The worst cases of fallout I’ve seen have been caused by people using grinders, either in body shops, or people sharpening blades in the garage. more »

Fallout is anything that falls on your car, contaminates it and can damage the paint or otherwise ruin the appearance.Usually when people talk about fallout, they mean industrial fallout, specifically raildust. Raildust is particles of metal, most commonly from railway lines (hense the name) but it can come from any industrial process. Contamination with metal particals is a subject which deserves it’s own entry which can be found here. more »

That is almost impossible to answer!

(For the benefit of keeping this answer as simple as possible, I will be talking about traditional wax, not synthetic waxes, sealants or blends.)

We at Clean Image have tried many waxes over the years, and we still can’t decide on just one favorite! For example, we have one that works very well on light coloured cars, another that works well on dark coloured cars, another that is good for dark cars with swirl marks, and then we have the waxes which last a long time. more »

Yes, but it’s probably best not to!

“Orange Peel” is the name commonly given to a slightly rippled effect that is found on paintwork. The paint is sprayed on at the factory and because it is wet and the spray guns are pushing out a lot of air, the airstream leaves a visable rippled effect which is actually nothing like an orange!

Orange peel is a very old expression from back the days when cars were painted very differently from they way they are now. Different paints were used, different techniques were used, and very good paintwork on high end cars would be as smooth as glass while bad paint jobs really would look like orange peel or worse. more »

Oranges and Lemons… Maybe?

I happend upon a possible answer to this problem while talking to the owner of a gun shop! It seems that he often has people in his shop asking to buy air rifles, and when he asks them what kind of shooting they want them for, the answer is often that it’s to “keep the cats of the fish pond”. more »

Best for ease of use would be liquid waxes. They are far easier to apply, while wax paste usually needs to be applied and removed one panel at a time.

So what is the real difference? This is a question I have seen asked on many occasions of wax manufacturers. The answer is always the same, the only difference is the water content, there is no real difference in performance. But waxes that promise high quality and high Carnauba content tend to come as a paste as it gives the customer the feeling that they are getting more for their money. Some waxes come in a form which is even more sold than a paste, at least by reconing, and have the consistancy of shoe polish… these do seem to have a better shine than most, and I have never had any real problem applying them when following the instructions, in fact as there is no dust, they can often be easier.

I’m sure that there are experts out there with an opossing view on the subject, but as yet I haven’t heard it. If anybody who feels they are qualified to offer an opinion either way, please comment.