Back in the winter, rumors started to circulate about an exciting development in “Over The Counter” detailing stuff.  Autoglym, a well established line of detailing products from the UK, was coming to the US market.  And guess where it turned up first?

Walmart.

Seriously.  Walmart.

The first I’d heard about it was on the Detailing Bliss forum.  Once we had some confirmed sightings, I went on a quest, and found two pots of their High Definition Wax.  I bought them both.

The wax was worth the hunt.  Remember, this is a wax that used to cost US customers upwards of $100, as recently as last year.  Now we could get it for less than $40.  At Walmart. Right next to the Turtle Wax.

And now, Pep Boys has picked up some Autoglym stuff as well.  Pep Boys pricing is about 10-20% higher than that of Walmart, but coupons are pretty easy to secure that make the prices comparable.  What’s more, Pep Boys carries more than just the wax.  I’ve recently tried Autoglym Vinyl & Rubber Care, and it’s outstanding.  It works just like Einszett Vinyl-Rubber, for a similar price, but it can be found locally.  It has a nice low sheen to it, it doesn’t streak, and it smells great.  Definitely worth consideration next time you want to try a new vinyl and rubber dressing.  Pep Boys also carries Autoglym’s Rapid Detailer (a quick detailer), Super Resin Polish (a filling sealant), and Bodywork Shampoo Conditioner (a maintenance soap).  We can only hope that Custom Wheel Cleaner will make its way over here too.

Crazy, right?  Well…maybe they actually are a little crazy.  I’m very happy with the two products I’ve tried so far.  And hey, the more quality detailing products available in retail stores, the less often I have to pay to have something shipped from out of state, or out of the country.  But has Autoglym made the right play here?  In my opinion, perhaps they haven’t.  $35-40 for a pot of wax is a pretty big ask for most of the auto parts store / Walmart car care buying public.  Especially from a brand that most people have never heard of.  I’m worried that $40 pots of wax won’t fly off the shelves at Walmart and Pep Boys, Autoglym will pull back out of the US market, and we’ll all be stuck paying double what the Brits pay again.

I wish Autoglym all the success in the world, and hope they thrive in the US.  In the meantime, consider trying some of their stuff, particularly High Definition Wax.  I’m very happy with what I’ve tried so far.

You can see pictures of a Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution IX MR that I detailed with Autoglym High Definition right here.

I often get asked for recommendations on the “best” detailing products of various subcategories.  And often, those asking are people who don’t want to order products online.  I have good news.  While many “Over The Counter” (OTC) products are pretty mediocre, some are excellent.  Duragloss is a company that makes excellent stuff that you can buy at some auto parts stores.

I haven’t used the entire Duragloss line, which is comprehensive.  Everything that I have used, however, has been outstanding.  Here is a sampling:

• 501 Marine and RV Polish.  Don’t let the “marine and RV” name fool you, this stuff is wonderful when used on automobiles.  It’s cleaning power is amazing.  Even if you’ve just clayed your entire vehicle, when you use DG501 on it with a rotary or dual-action buffer, I promise that you’ll pull even more dirt off the surface.  501 cleans on a chemical basis, rather than with abrasives.  It even leaves a layer of protection behind.  I use 501 all over the place, but it has become seriously useful for removing cone marks from autocrossing my S2000.
• 111 Clear Coat Polish.  This is a sealant that offers great ease of use, great durability, and excellent looks.
• 755 Nu-Glass.  This is a heavy duty, chemical-based cleaner for window glass.  Have a windshield with severe water spotting?  Try this.  It’s an amazing cleaner that’s easy to use.
• 751 Rain Repel.  This is a glass cleaner with rain-repellent magic mixed in.  It’s not the strongest glass cleaner in the universe, but that’s why you have 755 Nu-Glass.  Rain Repel offers the benefits of Rain-X, without the impossible to remove haze all over your windows.
• 921 Fast Clean & Shine.  Finally, a Quick Detail spray that actually works!  Have you ever tried the latest “flavor of the month” QD spray, only to find it a hassle to use?  I know I have.  A lot of them leave a slight haze behind that takes some time to remove.  Still more of them don’t do a lot for your vehicle’s finish.  Isn’t one of the words in “Quick Detailer” actually “Quick?”  I thought so!  921 solves all of these problems.  It adds a nice little zip to your finish, and is brainlessly easy to use.  No hazing, no streaking, no hassles.
• And now, the best item in their entire lineup: 951 Aquawax.  This is used during your drying step after washing your car.  It couldn’t be any easier, and the shine it provides is absolutely astounding!  It’s a great way to “top up” your finish between full details.  Once you try it, I promise that you’ll never wash without it again.

In addition to working well, all of the above mentioned products cost less than $10.  And, you can get them at certain auto parts stores.

Much like Majestic Solutions’ products, one can make the case that Duragloss is letting their own products down with their packaging.  The spray bottles work wonderfully well, but the labels on them look like they were designed in the early 1980s.  And they probably were.  Put some glitzy, exotic looking packaging around Duragloss stuff and you’d have a new and excellent boutique brand.  Duragloss also has the annoying habit of calling a lot of their products “polishes” when they’re not actually polishes.  But, whatever.  If you’ve got an auto parts store nearby that stocks Duragloss, give them a chance.  You won’t be disappointed.

There are certain items that I wouldn’t be without as a detailer.  A lot of those products are from a company you may have never heard of: Majestic Solutions.  Majestic Solutions (MS for short) is a small, family owned company in Raleigh, NC, that makes many of its products right there in the back of their building.  Mostly, they service NC area auto dealers and car washes through their delivery truck business.  They also have a small, but well stocked, retail store up front.  And it’s here where I (and my buddy JL) buy a whole bunch of the products I use the most of.  Here are my three favorites.

Just for a start, their flagship car soap, Ultra Gloss, is my absolute favorite soap.  It’s seriously slick.  It suds up great.  It smells like cherries.  And it’s loaded with polymers, so it’s like washing a car with a big bucket of high-end quick detailer.  I’ve tried many of the high end, “boutique” soaps, and Ultra Gloss is my easy favorite.  Price independent.  Nevermind that the stuff costs $20…a gallon.

Super Green Stuff all-purpose cleaner is another one that I use every time I detail a car.  It’s my de-facto wheel cleaner.  I use it in engine bays and wheel wells, on tires, on rubber trim, anything that needs a thorough cleaning.  You cut it 3:1 (water:product) for the toughest tasks, so it’s very cost effective.  It even smells good.  And it’s only $12/gallon!

Maybe most impressive, though, is one of their carpet cleaners, called Extraction Plus.  Seriously.  I don’t know how it’s possible, but stains just…disappear.  It’s eerie.  You spray it on, agitate, blot it up, and that’s it.  I can not overstate how amazing this stuff is.  And you cut it 10:1 (water:product), so a quart bottle lasts for a really long time.  It smells great, too.  I’ll put it this way.  My mother has three cats and three dogs.  She needs a good carpet cleaner.  She’s hooked on Extraction Plus.  Only problem is, it works so well, that it leaves the surrounding, uncleaned areas looking a little dingy.  It’s that good.

I’ve probably got a dozen or more Majestic Solutions products in regular rotation, but those three are the real standouts.  Their website doesn’t look like much, and they don’t have fancy bottles and boutique labels.  But try them out anyway.  Excellent, excellent stuff.

Credit for this goes to the guys on Detailing Bliss.

Sort of like ice cream, when it comes to “wash media,” everybody has a favorite.  Some detailers insist on lamb’s wool mitts.  Others are sea sponge advocates.  There are microfiber mitts, hundreds of different sponges, and all sorts of “clever” ideas that often don’t work.  I’ve tried a handful of different wash media, and I keep returning to a grout sponge you can buy at Lowe’s Home Improvement for two bucks.

It’s perfectly sized.  It’s large, but not so large that you empty your entire wash bucket using it to wash the roof of a small car.  :)  It’s super soft.  It fits your hand well.  It creates a lot of suds when you squeeze it.  And don’t forget…it’s two bucks!  I wish I could remember who it was that originally discovered this little gem.  It wasn’t me.

I love Vinylex, which is made by the Lexol folks.  I’ve tried a bunch of other plastic/vinyl/rubber dressings, even dating back many, many years ago, when I was 16 and used Dad’s Armor All.  The man who first introduced me to proper detailing products suggested that I try Vinylex instead of Armor All.  I did, and I loved it.  That was probably 18 years ago.  Since then, I’ve used a handful of the many boutique dressings, and some of the more mainstream ones too.  I keep returning to Vinylex.

I use Vinylex on interior trim (dashboards, control panels, etc) where I want to darken up the plastic or vinyl and bring some life back into it.  Vinylex can be shiny if you use a lot of it; some people like shiny, and that’s fine.  Me, I don’t care for shiny.  So, I don’t get all heavy handed with the Vinylex, and in spots where I do, I simply buff it with a clean, dry microfiber towel.  This evens up the look, reduces some of the shine, yet still leaves plastic and vinyl looking great.

It’s also excellent on stuff like rubber weatherstripping.  It’ll keep your weatherstripping nice and pliant, and will help those of you in cold climates when opening your doors.  It won’t rub off onto your pants leg when you get in and out of your car, either.  It also works great under the hood, on things like radiator hoses and vacuum lines.

I’ve used it on the black plastic trim (which I wrote about redying recently), too.  As with all dressings, it’s not permanent, but it makes a nice difference to black plastic.  Vinylex is even an excellent tire dressing.  If you like your tires to look black and new, but not “used car lot shiny,” give Vinylex a try.  It looks great.

People on detailing forums rave about 303 Aerospace Protectant.  And they’re right, it’s a great product.  Vinylex is just as good, costs a lot less, and is much easier to find.

Dressings can make it look a lot better.  Clean the item well, and apply the dressing per the directions on its label.  Detailing e-stores and auto parts store shelves are crowded with products called “Black Eternity” and “Trim Fixer Upper.”  Some of them work pretty well.  But most of them don’t.  Inevitably – even with the best trim dressings – your trim will look gray, weatherbeaten, and ragged again.  Hopefully, your dressing won’t have run down all over the rest of your car in the meantime (you did wipe off the excess, correct?)

Anyway, we’ve all had it with this stuff.  I’ve found the fix.  Re-dye it.

This is a process that isn’t always practical; it’s best when done on trim that can be removed from the vehicle.  On an E46 BMW 330i ZHP I recently did, for example, there was a large expanse of black plastic honeycomb covering the air intake for the radiator.  The car owner might know how to remove this piece, but I, as a detailer, certainly shouldn’t disassemble the front bumper of a $40K+ car.

If it’s something that can be removed somewhat easily, though, I think re-dyeing the trim is the way to go.  Here’s a re-dye of the mirrors on my personal F250.

Before starting, they looked rough, weatherbeaten and fading.  They’re famous for this, and dressings only make them look better temporarily:

I took them off the truck and masked off the glass so I wouldn’t get any overspray onto it.

Wipe them down with some sort of body solvent:

Spray with the plastic dye of your choice.  The one I used is made by Malco:

After you’ve applied the dye, reinstall the items, and admire the improvement:

So, there you have it.  If the plastic trim you’re working with can be removed from the vehicle without damaging it, try redying it.  It’ll look much better, for much longer, than it ever could with simple dressing.

• James May claims that there is one item in his car – a paintbrush, to brush dust out of the crevices between buttons and whatnot.  I do that too (although mine doesn’t happen to be a paintbrush)
• During the “Cheap Porsche Challenge (Season 5, episode 6),” the other two presenters do outlandish things to their cars to impress the Porsche Club judges.  James has his engine bay detailed.  Which is what I’d have done.
• There is a similar challenge involving Alfa Romeos (Season 11, episode 3).  Similarly to the Cheap Porsche Challenge, there is a car show that the guys take their cars to.  True to form, Jeremy and Richard do ridiculous things.  James polishes the paint on his.  Which is what I’d have done.
• James has often spoken of his compulsion regarding the vent registers in his car.  They all have to be pointing in exactly the same direction.  I’m the same way.  When I’ve got passengers, and they move the vents, I don’t stop them – but as soon as I’m finished carrying them around, I return them to their correct position.

This kind of compulsion is what drives me to do something like polish the bare metal under the hood of my S2000.  I started off with the hard A/C lines.  They’re made out of aluminum, and are uninsulated in parts.  They were looking oxidized and white, like aluminum often does.  So, I polished them.  Shortly after doing so, I discovered that the lettering on the spark plug cover is unpainted.  So, it all had to match:

More shiny A/C line goodness:

Now, a “before” photo of the spark plug cover lettering:

After polishing:

Tom’s car nearly killed me.

From about 20 feet away, or in photos, Tom’s car didn’t look too bad.  A dark silver Mazda3 hatchback, and only a couple years old with 50K miles on the clock, it seemed like it would be easy enough.  Tom had told me that it had some latex house paint on it, which came off a tarp in his garage and got all over the car.  This was the one thing Tom wanted fixed more than anything else.  How hard could it be?

Well, pretty bleeping hard, actually.  Two different clays, the second of which was very aggressive, didn’t touch it.  Not a dent.  Next, I tried the buffer.  After my usual standby of Menzerna Power Finish PO203S and a green Uber polishing pad didn’t touch it, I prepared to wail on it.  Yellow Uber compounding pad, Menzerna Power Gloss compound, and 1750rpm from the Makita.  Nothing.  NOTHING.

So, what finally worked?  3M General Purpose Adhesive Remover.  This stuff is fantastic.  It will remove stubborn sticker glue, years-old tree sap, and just about anything else.  Including house paint.  And it’s paint safe.  I went after every little white freckle, by hand, with several microfiber towels, some disposable rubber gloves, and the 3M stuff.  I won’t swear that I got every freckle, since there were hundreds of them, but I bet there are less than ten left.  Probably less than five.

After that, it was back to the usual.  I polished the 3 with various stuff until I was happy with it in direct sunlight, with no LSP down.  Once I was, I applied some Collinite 845 Insulator Wax.  Tom wanted durability, so this was a no-brainer.  Collinite also happens to look awesome.  Excellent LSP doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg – you just have to know what you’re looking for, and where to find it.

When I was all done, if I do say so myself, the car was transformed.  I went back down to the garage to take pictures of it, bent down to get a close-up of the front bumper, and my back went.  That put me out of commission for several days, but it seems all better now.

Tom was thrilled, so it was all worth it in the end.

Scrrrrrape.

Yeah.  Put the nose of the S2000 right up on a parking stone.  Which wouldn’t have been the end of the world; this front bumper is pretty beat up, from lots of autocrossing, a stray tire carcass last year, and loads of stone chips.  It had also been up on a driveway entrance before, so the very underside of it was already scraped up.  But no, this was worse.  I’d lucked into a strangely shaped parking stone, such that when I contacted it, the lip of the car sort of folded downwards.  So the face of the bumper was now nicely scraped up, verrtically, like a waterfall from the air intake down to the bottom.

!@#*^@ !&$#%#!

So, I figured, I’m stuck with it now, I may as well go to the meet.  Which was, as ever, a great time.  Probably 16 S2000s were there.  I bumped into Britt, a client with a 1970 Porsche 911E, who was there to show off his beautiful car.  We all hung out some, I learned a little more about Porsches, and then the S2000 gang went to lunch.  After lunch, it was time for a nice drive.  Once we were done with the drive, it was time for me to go home and see if I could fix the bumper.

I started, naturally, by cleaning off the affected area while my 3M Wetordry paper (1500 and 2000 grit) soaked in water.  I took a deep breath, got out the 1500, and went to work.  I followed that with the 2000 paper, keeping the surface soaking wet the whole time.  Once that was done, out came the Makita rotary polisher to remove the sanding marks.  I decided against wool; it’s a small little area on a plastic bumper, and I didn’t want to go super aggressive if I didn’t have to.  I ended up with a 4″ Uber polishing pad, and some Menzerna Power Gloss.  There are a couple areas where you can tell I’ve done some work, but really, it looks no worse than it did before.

Wet sanding isn’t something I’d recommend someone new to detailing try out.  You’re rubbing your paint with sandpaper.  It’s a BIG step.  So, if you’ve never done it before, go to your local neighborhood body shop, and see if they’ll let you take a couple of junk panels home.  It’s much better to learn on a junk panel than on your beloved car or truck (or, worse, someone else’s beloved car or truck).

This winter, if the money is there, I’ll either put a new bumper on it, or put an OEM lip on it.  The lips are freaking expensive, and set the nose even lower than it is already, but man, do they look good.

Clean your tires first – you should do this before applying any dressing – and then apply Tropi-Care towards the end of your detail.  Use an applicator, rather than spraying it onto the tires directly; this saves product, and reduces overspray.  Make one pass around the tire, then move the car a few inches to get that spot that you missed closest to the ground.  Stand back and admire.

Here’s a photo of my Honda S2000 with Tropi-Care on the tires:

Not shiny, but they still look great.