Car Detailing: Waxing

Video Transcript

"Hi this is Dow here at the Firehouse Detail Shop, today we're detailing the exterior of a car segment by segment, teaching you how to do it like a professional . We're to that stage right now where we want to talk about the all important waxing of the vehicle. Of course the cars has got to be clean. If it had any kind of industrial fall out, we want to have all of that removed with the clay which we talked about in an earlier segment. We're staring now, kind of the pure paint, scratches have been removed, oxidation, one of the hardest things here is selecting the right product because there's so many available on the market. There is waxes with polymers, there's paint protections which are more expensive but which bond to the paint and actually will give you extended protection. We use a wax protectant that we're confident lasts ninety to one hundred and twenty days. It bonds, it uses a combination of polymers and other things. You of course we've heard of the Carnauba waxes which are from a tree, they're organic, they do a wonderful job at shining up the car, they just don't have the lasting properties. So find the wax that best suits you. Talk to your detail specialist. Where we see a lot of cars and do a lot of waxes on a day to day basis, we've been very happy with this wax protectant we're about to use, and then the question is how you're going to apply it to the car. In a high end detail you don't, you want to be careful not to get it on the trim because the waxes and the silicones can actually discolor and maybe leave a white residue on the black trim. So be cautious the way you do that. You might even want to mask it off with tape or cover it. A couple methods, if you're going to do it by hand you can always use an applicator pad and simply put the wax on it and start, you know, start applying the wax to the car. Small little swirls is ok. You want to go back and forth. Not, we're not doing it like they did in the "wax on wax off". You actually want to apply the wax back and forth in the way that the air flows over. So small swirls, that's kind of, that's for Hollywood. For a professional detailer you want to go back and forth the way air flows over the car, ok? Now we actually use an orbital buffer. It's located right here. This orbital buffer, we simply apply some, we get it spinning, add a little product to it, and you'll go back and forth across the car like we talked about in the direction that air flows. What that does is it's using small vibrations movement, and it works the wax into the paint a little better than we can by hand, and it allows us to move a little faster over the car without compromising the quality. We can wax a car in a hand wax express, you know, in about ten minutes a vehicle this size by utilizing these tools. This one's run by air, there's also electric hand orbitals. They're inexpensive, you can get them from your professional detail supply shop, and they do a great job of applying the wax. Now we've got it on, we'll often work our way around the entire vehicle, give the time for the wax to be on there to bond, and then we just simply get a microfiber towel, come in, again same direction back to front, remove the wax, changing the towel and flipping it on a regular basis so you're wiping the car with a clean portion."