One of the worst feelings you can have is driving a car with a sticky steering wheel. Personally, I’ve driven company vehicles for my day job with several that were more than 10 years old and have been changed hands many times. Some of them had some really tacky-feeling steering wheels. Although the steering wheel might be tacky due to the steering wheel material itself, in most cases it is simply due to the steering wheel being dirty.
If you’re thinking about removing decals from your car’s paint, you have to look at a few variables before deciding on if and how you are going to remove the decals. If your car is brand new or fairly new, the decals may come off easily with minimal work. If the decals have been on for quite a long time (say a few years or longer), it will more difficult the longer it has stayed on your car’s paint. Sometimes you just have to weigh the potential risks of removing old decals with the benefit of how your car will look afterwards. The older the vehicle, the more likely the possibility of you causing more damage to the car’s paint from removing the decal.
Car detailing is sometimes really all about the details. These small details when looking at them individually may seem inconsequential, but taking a step back it can make a dramatic difference. Take the typical seat belt buckle with the little red button on it. These little plastic buttons look great when they’re new, but over many years, the plastic oxidizes and eventually the red color fades. Then, you’re left with a faded red seat belt button that is commonly found on older vehicles.
When removing old decals off of your car, there are two stages to doing it. The first is the safe and effective removal of the decal, and the second is the elimination of decal residue. The decal residue can make a “ghost image” appear even though the window looks clean and free of residue. The longer the decal has been on the glass, the more likely you will having this “ghosting” effect left behind.
There’s one major thing I love about Undrdog Pro Coating and that is how easy it is to apply, even when you doing it outside. Since I don’t have a sheltered parking spot, nor a large enough of a garage to park a car, applying a ceramic coating (with its inherent finicky flash times) outdoors can be tricky. But with Undrdog Pro, I never felt the product dry up or flash too quickly; it just went on and buffed off effortlessly. So for now, I’m incredibly happy with this product, but the real test is how long this product lasts.
There’s more than one way to do a deep clean on your car’s windows. There’s the method of using an abrasive like a polish such as Bar Keeper’s Friend or Weiman Cooktop Cleaner if you already own these household items. However, my preference for cleaning windows is to use either 0000 steel wool or a white scotch pad along with glass cleaner.
On this guide, I’m focusing on removing heavy orange peel and the techniques used to do this. Typically the process involves sanding or wet-sanding the vehicle from lower to higher grit, then following up with an aggressive compound to buff/polish the small scratches out. I will be demonstrating both dry and wet-sanding techniques, as well as following up with a Meguiar’s compound, microfiber cutting pad, and a long throw polisher to finish it off.
Instead of spending hundreds to thousands of dollars on an ultrasonic paint thickness gauge, we can instead use an affordable magnetic/Eddy-current gauge as long as we have an understanding what the typical layers on a modern day car are, what the thickness of these layers are. By knowing the typical thickness of each layer that encompasses a “paint job”, we can have a general idea of how much clear coat we have before we wear down to the paint, primer, or even substrate.
Meguiar’s Hybrid Ceramic Wash and Wax is different from your traditional “wash ‘n wax” product that traditionally combines soap and wax into one. This product separates both car soap and wax into two separate chambers in its packaging: a larger one containing a low-sudsing soap to gently clean the vehicle, and a smaller one with the wax additive that exhibits excellent hydrophobic properties. This guide on how to use Meguiar’s Hybrid Ceramic Wash & Wax is intended to help supplement the provided instructions from Meguiar’s and to provide some helpful tips and tricks to getting the most out of this product based on my own experiences. A big thank you to Meguiar’s for providing this product for me to test and write about.
