Step By Step Cleaning

Authored by: Nepherim

I gave in to fears about the claybar destroying already thin paint, and spent the last 7 hours washing and claybaring.

I used a Mothers California Gold kit. Came with a bar (good for 3 MR2’s), some detailing liquid, and a small thing of carabuna wax. Oh, and I used microfibre cloths. Completely lint free, left no scratches, and worked great. I used the NTX paste. I suspect the paste will last better, as it’s easier to put it where you want. It also went on so easily, I find it hard to understand how the spray would be easier! It’s expensive, but it’ll last quite a few applications.

I found that there were a few sap marks that just refused to come out though. The claybar did okay with small specs, but 10mm or bigger sap marks refused to budge. Nail polish remover didn’t work either and left some nasty assed marks that I hope polishing will tidy up tomorrow.

First we have the trunk, not washed for a few weeks:

Quick wash with some dishwashing soap:

And the side after the wash. Some good reflections, but nothing much.

So now I start the clay. Half is clayed, and half not. A small difference can be seen in the picture – about the same as I could see.

Some nice reflections now – of course it’s mid-afternoon now

So for now it looks like the claybar wins (no paint damage what-so-ever from the claybar – there’s pretty much no way you could damage the paint as long as you keep squirting the spray). Visually it looks pretty good, about the same as after a wax. The surface is very glassy smooth now though.

Tomorrow we’ll see what polishing and NTX does for things.

Well ScratchX is a real pain in the ass. It does very little and leaves large smears when you try to buff it off.

I think my problem with the ScratchX was that I didn’t let it dry sufficiently. The other thing is to take it off in 1"-2" sections gently buffing. I tried big 6"-12" buffs, and smear city.

I’m going to be using NTX after polishing, rather than wax. I was considering adding a layer of Mothers carbuna after NTX, but not sure if it’s going to be worth it, or if it’ll just wipe of the NTX.

And the results are in. Claybar and NTX scooored! The results are excellent. The surface is extraordinarily smooth; all swirls are now gone, and several large scratches (around 15") are history.

A word though. Polishing is a real PITA. In the future I will not do it unless I have a buffer. I’m really not convinced that polishing was very effective, I strongly suspect the NTX did much of the work. It took over 5 hours to polish everything, and it was very tough work.

The NTX was a dream, and took around an hour of easy work. It went on silky smooth, no effort. And rubbed off almost as easily. There’s not as much depth as I’d hoped, but it shiny as hell, and I may try more NTX, or possibly the Mothers carabuna that came with the claybar to increase the depth a little.

All in all a rewarding way to spend two days… just no more manual polishing for me.

Compare this one with the very first pics in the post…