EXTERIOR DETAILING

OUR EXTERIOR DETAILING CHECKLIST

View all of the items we can do for the exterior of your vehicle.

OUR 10 STEP EXTERIOR DETAILING PROCESS

Learn about how we clean and protect the exterior of your vehicle.

1) PREPARATION

Before we begin the exterior detail, we have to prepare. We’ll hook up our hose and extension cord to the outlets provided by the customer and lay out all of our tools and products. We use a 3-bucket system to reduce any chance of cross contamination. We have a bucket for Wheels only, a bucket for Paint only, and a Rinse bucket. What do we mean by reducing cross contamination? Essentially, we want to reduce the risk of causing micro-abrasions to the paint. Micro-abrasions are inevitable and happen every time you touch your car. They add up over time and without the proper preparation your vehicle would end up with those swirl marks (or love marks as we call them) all over the place. You wouldn’t want to use just one bucket and use the same wash mitt and chemicals for everything. The wheels have their own dedicated bucket and cleaning equipment because of what’s on the wheels. Not only is there just dirt and grime and whatever gets kicked up from the road, but there’s also brake dust. Break dust is metal. You wouldn’t want to have metal dust being scraped all over your paint. This is the cross contamination we are talking about. So the wheel gets it’s own bucket and cleaning tools that are only ever used on wheels. We also use different cleaning products on the wheels than we do the paint. For the wheels you need a product that can break down the brake dust, which is an aggressive cleaner. The paint cleaner acts more as a lifter that lifts the debris from the paint so we can wipe it off. Then we move to the Paint and Rinse buckets. As we wash the car, our wash mitts pick up the tiny debris from the paint of your car. We use the rinse bucket to remove this debris after a few strokes on the paint before dunking the mitt back into the Paint bucket that contains the soap. This again ensure that we are never dragging debris across the paint which would result in micro-abrasions. With our preparations complete, we begin the exterior detailing process.

2) Engine Bay Cleaning

Engine bay cleaning is an add-on service for our exterior detailing services. If you decide to include this in your detail, this is where we start. We begin by removing any large debris by hand that has settled around the engine bay, including leaves, pollen pods, etc. With the large debris removed, we then use either a strong or mild degreaser depending on how dirty the engine bay is. We will let the degreaser dwell for about 1-2 minutes before applying a soap and then scrubbing the entire engine bay with a large scrub brush. Once the entire engine has been scrubbed, we’ll use small detailing brushes to agitate any tight areas that couldn’t be reached with our larger brush. After every reachable inch of the engine bay has been scrubbed, we rinse everything off to reveal a fresh, clean-looking engine bay. The last step is to grab a microfiber towel and dry off the engine bay. We’ll come back and apply dressing to the black plastic covers in the engine bay at the end of the detail when we are applying dressing to the tires and exterior black trim.

3) Wheel Cleaning

Next in the exterior detailing process is cleaning the wheels. We use 2-3 different products just for the wheels alone. Depending on the severity of the dirt and grime, we may start with a degreaser. Then we use a special product that breaks down break dust. It reacts with the iron and the chemical turns a plum color, showing that it’s working. We let that dwell for about 30-60 seconds before moving to our wheel soap. We use a large scrub brush to clean the face of the wheel, then we use our wheel woolies to clean the inner barrel of the wheel. We start at the top of the wheel and work our way down one side, once we’ve reached the bottom we go back up to the top and go the other way around. This allows the soap to run down the barrel of the wheel as we go which helps lift the dirt and grime. We’ll then take our wheel-only wash mitt and make sure we clean the back side of the rims. Lastly, we’ll take our wheel woolie and scrub the wheel well and then rinse the wheel off. Then we repeat the process for the other 3 wheels.

4) Exhaust Cleaning

This step is pretty straight forward and doesn’t require much explanation. We clean the exhaust in the middle of cleaning the wheels as we move from one side of the vehicle to the other. To clean the exhaust we use our wheel soap and wheel woolie to quickly remove any build up from the exhaust fumes before rinsing and moving on to the other two wheels.

5) Hand Wash

After the wheels and exhaust are clean we move on the paint and body of the car. We rinse the car first to remove any loose contaminates. We wait to rinse the vehicle until this point because we don’t want the water to dry on the vehicle. If we were to rinse the vehicle before cleaning the engine bay and wheels, the water would start to dry on the vehicle, introducing more contaminates to the paint. Once the vehicle has been rinsed down we begin the hand washing process. We start at the top of the vehicle with our Paint wash mitt and work our way down. Our wash process goes roof, windshield, hood, side windows, side paint until halfway down wheel well, then other side, then back last. For the bottom half of the sides, front, and back, we use a different mitt. The reason for this is because there are different contaminates on the lower portion of the vehicle and we don’t want to drag those up the vehicle. Especially right behind the wheels where there is usual more dirt and debris, as well as brake dust. If there are any bugs we use our bug removal sponge that has a netting on it that helps lift the bugs from the paint. Once the car has been completely washed we move on to drying.

6) Dry + Hydrate

We use microfiber towels when drying your vehicle. We also introduce a product here that not many other Detailers do. We spray on a special product to the microfiber towel that helps to hydrate the paint as we remove the standing water. This product gets absorbed into the paint and helps lubricate the towel as we dry the vehicle. This is the step that usually introduces a lot of those micro-abrasions. Specs of dirt and dust fall onto the car after washing, and if you don’t use a lubricant while drying you are grind that new debris into the paint as your dry. This is just one of many details that set us apart from other detailing companies.

7) Exterior Glass Cleaning

After the paint has been dried and hydrated, we move on to cleaning the glass. This step is fairly straight forward but we do use a special method that helps us create invisible glass. We spray the window and wipe with a microfiber towel to pick up any contaminants. We then spray the window again and use a squeegee to remove the cleaner. From there we buff off any remaining cleaner and leave behind invisible glass.

8) Paint Protective Coat

Instead of using just a wax or polish to finish the exterior detailing, we apply a paint protective coating that sheets water, protects the paint from UV, and also provides a deep shine. We apply a few drops of the product to a microfiber application pad and coat one panel at a time. We wait for about 30 seconds until the coating has dried and has a rainbow effect to it before buffing it off with a microfiber towel, leaving the paint shining and protected.

9) Tire Dressing

The tire dressing product that we use are designed to moisturize the tires and leave behind a semi-gloss finish. We want the tires to look like nice, clean rubber, not like plastic! The product we use is also designed to help eliminate tire sling. Tire sling occurs when the tire dressing is “slung” from the tires and onto the paint of your car. This isn’t good and occurs a lot with cheap dressing chemicals. First we apply the product gel to a foam applicator. Then we work the product into the tires. We don’t just drag the applicator around the wheel a couple times and call it a day, we really work the product into the tire by first going around the perimeter of the sidewall, and then going around again, this time going back and forth from the tread to the rim. The goal is to have the tire absorb the dressing, not to just apply the dressing to outside. This results in a much cleaner application.

10) Black Trim Dressing

The final part of the detail is to dress the black trim of the car. While we are not restoring extremely faded trim, which requires sanding and repainting, we are however revitalizing the trim with a semi-gloss finish. Like with our tires, the goal is not to make the black trim look sopping wet, the goal is to work the product into the plastic to revitalize it and leave behind a semi-gloss appearance.