How clean is your car after you take it to the car wash? On the surface, you’re probably quite pleased with the attractive shine it has. The most conspicuous grime from the road is gone from the bodywork, the windows sparkle, and if you’ve had the insides valeted too, it can feel like a brand new vehicle again.
But how closely are you looking? Go on, go right up to it. Even fresh from a ‘wash and wax’, inspect the paintwork closely and you might be surprised by what you see. What looked from a distance like a pristine clean surface is likely to be anything but. You’ll see tiny particles of dust and grime, discolouring marks and defects.
How did the wash miss these? Have you wasted your money? Well, not exactly. Try giving those marks a gentle rub with your finger. Unlike ordinary, visible road grime, they don’t wipe off. That’s because these contaminants have become bonded into the top surface of your paintwork.
Tiny particles physically stuck into the clear coat that forms the top surface of your paintwork cannot be removed by water, soap and a cloth or brush alone. So although a standard car wash will get your car ‘clean’, it’s not ‘as-new’ clean.
If you do want to go the extra mile and make your vehicle spotless, you will need to take it to a specialist professional detailer – or else use one of the tricks of the trade that specialist professional detailers use. Namely, a clay bar.
What Has Clay Got To Do With Cleaning A Car?
Unlike simple soap and water, clay will remove surface contaminants that have become embedded into the paintwork of your car. Let’s be clear – we’re not talking the kind of clay that you spin on a wheel to make pottery here. The clay bar sold as a car detailing product is an engineered resin, mostly manufactured from synthetic compounds these days, that has a very elastic feel to it.
That elasticity is important. The idea is that you rub, roll, scrape and stretch the clay over the body work of your car. As you do so, embedded contaminants like dust, sap, insect residue and tar get pressed into the surface of the clay bar and stick. When the clay is moved away, the substances are lifted out of your paintwork.
How To Use A Clay Bar Correctly
Clay barring is not something you need to or indeed should do every time you wash your car. No matter how befuddled you are by the fact that you’ve just forked out on a premium wash and there are bits of tiny debris still stuck all over your paintwork, simply attacking it with a clay bar is not the answer.
Detailing clay is an abrasive. It isn’t just bits of dirt and debris that this elastic stuff pulls from the surface of your paintwork – it will drag out tiny bits of the paint’s upper surface, too, leaving miniscule scratches all over the place.
It’s therefore vitally important that you don’t clay your car unless you are going to polish it immediately afterwards. Polishing smooths the top upper surfaces of paintwork to remove any imperfections.
In terms of using the clay itself, clay bars are available in three different grades which describe how abrasive they are. Start with the lightest grade and see if that does the job first – the easiest way to tell is to run your fingers over the paintwork. If it still feels grainy, there is more debris in there that needs to be removed, so go to the next grade up.
You should always use a clay lubricant or general detailing spray when applying clay to minimise the marking done to your paintwork. Clay will also leave a residue behind, so wash thoroughly when you have finished, before polishing.
Claying is often recommended before you polish. The reason for this is, if any contaminants are still stuck to the surface when you take a polisher to it, these will simply be rubbed further into the paint, making them harder to remove and potentially leaving very unsightly blemishes.
Clay barring and polishing are complementary processes. You certainly don’t want to go to all that trouble every time your car needs a wash, but every six to 12 months, you can give your vehicle a real treat and revel in the bodywork getting that as-new gleam to it once again.
Inspired to give your car some TLC? Click here to view Slim’s full range of car polishing products.