How OCD are you about car washing and detailing?
Comments
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My car looks like the domicile of a homeless person
Im in Bumfuck Idaho. I moved here and cleaned my truck to show n shine levels then was immediately shit on by the gravel roads with oil. The dust, grit, and grim are on another level, and don't even get me started on the size 6 caddis that destroy the front grill. I don't give a shit anymore, I'll go through the scratch n wax drive through once a year...meh
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My car looks like the domicile of a homeless person
Yeah, you ain’t keeping your rig clean in Idaho between about September and July.
August is usually good clean rig time.
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My car looks like the domicile of a homeless person
August is dust and forest fire season, which does equate to a cleaner rig. I love my gravel, keystone can covered roads, keeps the city folk away
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I go to the Brown Bear Car Wash a few times a year and use the scratchy brush and/or drive through
Brown Bear has the same thing and I subscribe and I get my car washed even when it rains.
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I go to the Brown Bear Car Wash a few times a year and use the scratchy brush and/or drive through
Do you use a pressure washer on your cars?
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I go to the Brown Bear Car Wash a few times a year and use the scratchy brush and/or drive through
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I hand wash only, wax and Armor All regularly (i.e., better than 99% of the general public)
Cars aren't really waterproof, per se, over 20 years outside. They last much longer in doors.
But it's a use case thing. If I had a shitty 1992 Aerostar or Astro Van (you're true dream cars) and a bunch of nice tools, I too would park outside. Instead, I have a decent fleet of 1 to 2 year old vehicles and a shitty tool box.
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1st Place in the local car show level detailing
Not really. Never directly. I have a foam cannon setup and quit bothering with it since, in reality, all that method really does is pre-soak the panels on the car. It doesn't actually make it so you can spray foam and, blast foam off, and the car is clean. Looks cool in the YouTube videos, but the hassle getting all that stuff set up isn't worth it. If you want dirt to release/blast off of the paint really easily you need to have a ceramic coating on the paint.
I used to do the two-bucket method for washing which is one bucket of soapy water, one bucket of clean water. You use the clean water bucket to rinse the wash mitt after cleaning a section of the car at a time. The problem I found with that method is that by rinsing the mitt in a bucket of clean water you introduce a bunch of 100% water back in to the soap bucket and end up diluting the soap bucket with too much water which can impact the lubricity that the soapy water is supposed to have at a proper dilution.
So now I just use a grit guard in the bottom of my soap bucket and scrub the mitt against it after each panel. Does a good job of keeping the actual dirt at the bottom of the bucket rather than it getting back on the mitt and then rubbing against the paint.
Typing this out, I realize how nerdy this all sounds. This is the tip of the spear with how wonky some of this car detailing stuff can get.
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I hand wash only, wax and Armor All regularly (i.e., better than 99% of the general public)
See this what I'm talking about. I have a micro fiber mitt which is light years better than the scratchy foaming brush at the Brown Bear, but even with this you still get some swirl marks in the clear coat.
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1st Place in the local car show level detailing
And not all clear coats are alike. Some manufacturers are softer than others. I've found that to be the case with Japanese cars. I remember detailing a new-ish Caddy many years back and the clear coat very hard and the paint correction took twice as long as normal.
I've heard great things about this wash mitt.
