Services

What is Detailing Clay?

You might be thinking, “what can detailing clay do for my car?” The short answer is that auto detailing clay removes from the paint what washing cannot. For the long answer, read on!

An auto detailing clay bar is an engineered resin compound used to remove contaminants from the surface of your car’s paint, glass, fiberglass, and metal. Detailing clay can be natural or synthetic, though most manufacturers utilize synthetic clays.

Auto detailing clay is like the stuff you played with as a kid, but the clay used for detailing is usually much more elastic. The elasticity gives the detailing clay excellent durability as it is rolled, flattened, smashed and stretched over and over again.

Detailing clay is designed to stand up to the kind of contaminants that your childhood clay never had to face, i.e., industrial fallout, rail dust and brake dust. These contaminants pierce paint finishes, glass and metal and remain stuck on your vehicle through rain, car washes, and even polishing. The only way to remove these pollutants is – you guessed it – detailing clay.

How Does Auto Detailing Clay Work?

Detailing clay glides along the surface of your paint and grabs anything that protrudes from the surface. The particle sticks to the clay and is therefore removed from your vehicle. The surface being clayed should always be wet with clay lubricant to prevent loose debris from scratching the vehicle.

Used properly, detailing clay is completely safe and nonabrasive. It’s a much better option than polishing to remove these contaminants because clay doesn’t remove any paint.

What Does Detailing Clay Remove?

Your vehicle is under constant assault from airborne pollutants. Brake dust, industrial fallout, acid rain deposits and rail dust all can adhere to your vehicle. These contaminants often contain metal particulates, which accounts for the ease with which they penetrate the clear coat to attack the paint below. These contaminants then oxidize, and they allow rust to spread beneath the clear coat. Tiny orange spots today, total paint system failure tomorrow! Detailing clay removes these contaminants to keep the paint healthy and vibrant.

Detailing Clay also removes stubborn sap, tar, and bug remains. Detailing clay works wonders on glass as well. ​

Do You Need To Clay?

Chances are, the answer is yes. The surface of your vehicle faces assaults from the environment every time it’s out in the weather. Each road trip brings new insults from roadway debris, exhaust films, and airborne pollution. They will splash, mar, and embed themselves in that beautiful paint job you’ve labored over. Vehicles can accumulate these contaminants any time, any place – even at the dealership.

The Bag Test: 
There’s a simple test that will indicate whether or not you need to clay. Wash and dry your vehicle, put a plastic sandwich bag over your hand and lightly rub your fingertips over the paint. If it feels gritty or rough, your paint is contaminated.

What is Leather Care?

If leather is to retain its beauty, it must be cared for, cleaned and conditioned. It’s much easier to spend a little time protecting and conditioning your fine leather upholstery than spending the energy and money to salvage it. Once it’s gone down that road, there may be no return!

Have you seen leather that has been ignored and mistreated? What remains is dried, prematurely aged, and cracked leather. Fragile leather is the result of being bombarded with UV radiation, cooked in infrared heat, discolored with body oils, sand, & dirt. Without proper care and conditioning, your leather will age rapidly, losing its luster and flexibility.

What is Proper Leather Care?

What is Proper Leather Care?
Leather surfaces are just like beautiful, delicate skin. Leather must be carefully cleansed before it can be properly conditioned.

The Two-Step Solution
Step 1: A thorough cleansing of your leather using a pure cleaner, free of petroleum solvents, silicone oils or gloss agents – penetrates deep into every pore. Especially when applied with the gentle agitating action of a microfiber applicator pad, or a vinyl & leather scrub brush. Agitation, not scrubbing, is the key. This agitation opens pores and allows moisture to penetrate deep into the leather to cleanse and moisturize

Step 2: After a thorough cleansing, your leather is ready for step two, application of a leather care conditioner. The nourishing conditioner improves the look and texture of the leather by absorbing deep into the fibers, allowing these fibers to retain their resilience. Proper conditioning allows fibers to retain their flexibility and softness.

White Paint Vs. Black Paint

When it comes to correcting paint defects in your paint, be it scratches, swirls, or etchings, there are a lot of factors that need to be considered. This is because every paint job on each car is different. Even two cars that are the same make and model, manufactured in the same factory, and painted on the same day will need two very different paint correction processes. While there are far too many things to consider for us to flesh them all out here, we will focus on the factor that you may not have considered important, paint color.

Why would the paint color of a car change the process that you need to use to take out scratches and swirls? Well, it doesn’t really have anything to do with the paint itself, but more so how light interacts with the paint. In order to outline how and why that is, we are going to give you a short science lesson.

“Color” is actually just light that is reflected off of a surface. The “color” of a surface is based on which wavelengths of light that surface absorbs and which wavelengths it reflects. There are “cones” in our eyes that respond to different wavelengths of light. Depending on which “cones” are triggered, tells the brain which “color” to “see”. Color is a spectrum, spanning from White on one end to Black on the other. White reflects all light wavelengths back to your eye, whereas black absorbs all light wavelengths. This is where the major difference comes in. If you are looking at a surface that is reflecting all light wavelengths back at you, it is going to be pretty difficult to pick out the one spot on the surface that is reflecting back a little less light. However, if you are looking at a surface that is not reflecting any light back, you will quickly be able to see the small spot that is reflecting back any light at all.

For example, look at these two pictures:

The line is the exact same color in both images, but it is MUCH easier to see on the image with the black background! The same thing is true for black paint vs. white paint! Scratches are much easier to see on black paint.

So, what does this mean for a person trying to remove scratches from their paint? It means that when you are working on white paint, you don’t need to work nearly as hard. You can probably get away with just a mildly abrasive polish to remove the scratches and swirls and call it done. If you have severe damage, we would use a 2 step process, compound followed up with swirl remover to get a nice glossy looking finish. If your surface is in relatively good condition and all you need to do is knockout some minor swirling, swirl remover alone will be able to do the trick.

Now, what about black paint? Black paint will make every miniscule scratch stick out like a sore thumb! 90% of the time, the 2-step process is needed to remove scratches & swirls marks.