Classic & Show Car Preparation – Final Stage
Once your car is at this stage, regular gentle washing and topping up of wax should keep it that way.
Wheels
Your wheels will benefit from the same process, including wax, which will help prevent brake dust adhering to them and corroding them. Take care with acid based wheel cleaners – spray on, agitate with a brush and blast off with copious amounts of water. If you maintain a regular washing program their use will be infrequent. If you're really keen, remove the wheels, otherwise a flexible, bendable brush is invaluable, saving filthy and broken nails – for less than a fiver, a very sound investment.
What is Carnauba Wax?
The Northern Brazilian Carnaubeira Palm (Copernicia prunifera) secretes a hard wax to coat and protect its huge leaves, which is harmlessly harvested. Carnauba is a renewable and eco-friendly product. It's dried to flake and carefully blended with other oils and ingredients for car wax.
The difference between waxes and polishes
It's useful to make a clear distinction between the two to aid understanding of the processes. Polishing is the action of mechanically buffing a surface using an abrasive product which will remove a fine surface layer to create a uniform, reflective face and hence a shine. Whilst it will remove dead paint, unless the product contains certain oils, it will not actually feed lower layers of paint, so will not correct faded, leached paint.
A wax is a finishing treatment for the surface, with no cutting action; it will contain oils too, but critically, wax. The best is Grade One Brazilian Yellow Carnauba, but other waxes such as bees wax are used to bulk up some products. Do not be fooled by products which claim to be '100% Carnauba Wax', which I found on a bottle of a very well known brand of wax recently – if it were, it would be completely solid, unusable and frighteningly expensive. They're referring to the makeup of the wax element of the product only. Even the most expensive Swiss waxes contain no more than 60-75% Carnauba, at over £1,000 a pot.
Wax will dry as hard as concrete, filling in surface marks and indentations, increasing the refractive index of the surface and hence the shine. It will protect against UV, chemical attack such as bird lime, stone chips and enable much faster washing of the vehicle. A good quality product like "Auto Glym High Definition" will last 2-3 months on a car left outside. Natural waxes are particularly good on dark colours, including red, blue and black.
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