How do I maintain interior plastics?
August 7th, 2006 by Danny the web stig
The best way to maintain interior plastics is just to wash them to keep them clean… use a general purpose cleaner and wipe them clean. However, these days you have to be especially careful as there are lots of sensitive electrics behind the dashboard and door panels which tend to react badly to getting wet. I cannot stress this enough, getting the electrics wet can be very, very costly!
So never spray anything directly onto your plastic areas. Instead, use a damp cloth which has been wrung out so that it won’t drip - or use a dry cloth and spray your general purpose cleaner onto that. Alternatively, you can use wipes — some car care companies make wipes especially for the purpose but any general purpose wipes will do the same job.
You may also wish to get yourself a brush for dusting those hard to reach places such as air vents, around the indicator stalks and around the gear stick. You can get a proper detailing brush, but a 2″ paintbrush will do — just take care that the metal ferrule doesn’t scratch the plastics. You can prevent this by wrapping insulating tape around it. (A 4″ brush is shown left with tape wrapped around the ferrule).
And that’s pretty much it for general maintenance of your interior plastics because it works. You can use special dressing but quite frankly many of them are worse than useless, especially those in a spray can. They tend to be packed full of cheap silicones and oils. They make your dashboard shiny, they even make the dirt shiny! But many of them get sticky after a while so that all the dust sticks to them, they then dry out into a dirty looking residue which is really hard to get off. Furthermore, having a shiny dashboard can be very dangerous because there are certain circumstances where light can be reflected up onto the inside of your windscreen obscuring your vision.
There are so water based matt plastic dressing that are good but if you just keep your dashboard clean you shouldn’t really need them. If you do decide to use them, then the same rules apply - never spray them directly onto the dashboard and use them sparingly.
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