If you care for your car, you will be wanting to wash and polish it from time to time, rather than just putting it through the car wash.

If you fall into this group then this article should help you avoid some lesser known pitfalls, give you some useful hints and save you money!

Washing your car

There are some simple “do’s and don’t’s” you should follow when washing your car.

• Don’t wash your car in full sunlight – shade is preferable.
• Don’t use dishwashing liquid – it can be abrasive.
• Do use lots of soapy water.
• Do start at the top of your car and work down.
• Do wash your sponge clean of dirt regularly in a bucket of clean water.
• Don’t let soapy water dry on your car’s surface.
• Do use a good quality leather to dry your car.

Cleaning your car

OK, so you’ve washed your car and now it’s clean, isn’t it?

Well, no, probably not, because over a relatively short period of time your paintwork can be contaminated with fallouts of chemicals, dust particles, grease, oil, brake dust etc. that will not be removed by soap and water.

So, to do a proper job, you need to remove these contaminants from the paintwork.

Traditionally, detailers used a cutting compound but that was fraught with danger, as it was so easy to remove layers of paint as well!

But there’s a better way now. It’s called “claying”. Briefly, it’s a wad of “play doh” type material that you gently rub on your paintwork that will safely remove contaminants without damage or scratching.

This is a recent phenomenon (supposedly accidentally invented in Japan) and if you’d like to know more, then click here.

Polishing your car

This is the final crucial, time-consuming, confusing and often money-wasting step in preparing your paintwork.

Just look at the shelves in your local automotive supermarket and you can see how confusing it is. A massive array of preparations and prices that range from a few dollars to several hundred – even thousands. (One brand has a polish that costs $15,000!!) .You can buy a spray polish, a liquid or a paste. You can have them with synthetic ingredients, partly natural, or full natural waxes, with promises for “permanent protection, one year, six months or less.”

So which is best, and can you believe their claims?

A major US consumer research agency has done a lot of work monitoring and testing car polish treatments and has come up with some very interesting conclusions. They found that “paste waxes are easier to use than liquid waxes, liquid waxes cleaned the best and left the fewest stains on plastic parts, but they didn’t last as long as other wax types.”

For a more detailed analysis, click here.

One product that did shine out (sorry!) above the rest was also one of the best value products, comparing very favourably with liquids or waxes at twice the price. That product was Nu Finish NFP 80, in both liquid and wax form.

Would you like to try it? We have several bottles of Nu Finish liquid to give away – just click here.

This, then, is a brief guide to maintaining the duco of your car, but for a more thorough appraisal on:

How to clean your car – click here
How to polish your car – click here
How to win a great bottle of top quality car polish – click here