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When you apply compound or polish on your car, you might take the extra step of taping off the trim to prevent the compound/polish from getting stuck on your trim. To prevent this, taping off the trim can be an option, albeit it can be a time-consuming step. It’s also not totally necessary to tape off the car prior to polishing your car; you just have to know how to remove the polish if it does get on the trim of your car.
If you’ve ever had polish get on your trim, you will already know that you can’t just wipe it off sometimes. If you clean it off right away, it may be come off easily. However, it is left on for a while, it can be very stubborn to get off. Here is an example of some polish that got on my rubber trim. This trim is probably an exterme case where the rubber is decades old and is actually cracked.
As a first try, you should try cleaning with a microfiber towel or rag and some glass cleaner or all purpose cleaner. Try using something like a plastic trim tool behind the microfiber towel to get into the seams, where your hand or fingers can’t get into. If regular cleaning cannot get the polish off of the trim, you can try some more aggressive steps.
Probably the easiest and most miraculous tool you can use to quickly remove polish on your trim is an eraser. Some claim a regular pencil with that familiar pink eraser tip is the best tool for this job. I’ve found other types of erasers will work too, but I would have to give the edge to that pink eraser that everyone seems to rave about. The pink eraser tip on a pencil is also a nice small surface to rub on the trim, while the pencil portion gives you a good amount of control.
My experience is that most of the time, the eraser will do the trick. But, there might be times where the polish might still be stuck on the trim. For these most extreme cases, an option is to use a magic eraser. I don’t typically reommend using this, as it can be abrasive sometimes and cause damage to the trim and possibly paint if you happen to accidentally rub it against the nearby paint.
However, in cases where you must remove the polish or compound off your trim, you really need something abrasive enough to be able to clean it off completely. Just as you would whenever using a magic eraser, you may want to use some water or possibly cleaning solution like all purpose cleaner to clean it with.
The thing to remember when cleaning polish off your car is that it is not just about about cleaning the polish or compound off the trim with a particular method, but also ensuring that you making good contact between the cleaning product and the trim material. Sometimes, you need that small or thin tool to get the microfiber towel, or the eraser tip to be on contact with the trim. Otherwise, you’ll clean over or around that spot and if you look at it afterwards, will always appear as if you have polish not cleaned off of the trim.
If you want to avoid getting compound or polish on your car’s trim, I suggest taping up the trim prior to using your polisher. I know it does take a bit more time with an added step before polishing and after polishing, but you really can avoid a lot of these issues with polish leftover on your car’s trim. If your trim is older and cracked, you can potentially see even more issues as the polish can dry up in the cracks, which is incredibly difficult to remove afterwards.
If you tape your trim with painter’s tape or automotive tape, know that even though both tapes shouldn’t leave any residue behind when removed, automotive tape tends to stick on stronger than painter’s tape. In my experience, automotive tape may tear off and leave bits of tape on the trim, especially if it’s rubber trim. So my preference is probably to go with a painter’s tape rather than automotive tape–plus, it’s cheaper too.
