How to clean your car - intro
May 4th, 2006 by Anna
The Best way to clean your car!
Because I didn’t have the faintest idea about how to clean a car when I started (and that’s the whole reason for this website) let alone the best way to clean my car, I decided to ask an expert how to do it.
Gary from Clean Image has been a professional valeter for about 20 years and let me into all his trade secrets. But while following his instructions and in the writing of this article I have found there is a bit of a problem. When you are valeting a car professionally, time is money and over many years he has worked out ways to make the whole thing quicker and easier. The problem is that he will start a job, leave it half done, do something else, come back to it… and it isn’t always obvious as to why certain things are done in a certain way or certain order.
My problem is that if I write things exactly as he told me it would make the instructions very complicated and fragmented. So although it is crazy to ask the opinion of an expert and then ignore it, for the sake of clarity and brevity, I have decided that the how and why is more important than the when and have broken this down into two parts, interior and exterior, and will be tackling one job at at time.
At the end of the two sections I will write a checklist which will be a blow by blow set of instructions as to which order I do things in my article. This means that you don’t have to tackle the whole car all at once. You can do the interior one day and the Exterior the next. After all, the interior probably won’t need doing as often as the exterior.
However, for those that want to do a professional job, I’ll also supply a checklist detailing how to clean the whole car in one go.
Tools and Equipment.
To follow this guide you will need the following items (I have provided links to the stuff I’m now using and recommend, but you can use most brands) Please click on the orange links for explanations of [why] we recommend the things we do:-
- Bucket
- Wash Mitt [Why?]
- Soft Body Brush [Why?]
- Wheel Cleaner
- Wheel Brush or Dish Brush
- Car Shampoo or Wash’&'Wax
- Car Polish and Car Wax, or a Wax which will also polish.
- Application sponges [Why?]
- Microfibre cloths (It’s best to have two good ones) [Why?]
- Glass Cleaner
- General Purpose Cleaner
- Spray Foam Interior Cleaner
- Various Scrubbing Brushes
- A 2″ Paintbrush with tape wrapped around the ferrule. [Why?]
- Tyre Dressing
You will also need access to running water and a suitable vacuum cleaner.
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