Quick Detailing Tips from a Car Detailing Addict
It’s Friday night and you’re looking forward to your weekend. You’ve been driving your car all week but the weather had been fair to you. Your car isn’t dirty, but it’s not exactly clean either. What do you do?
I recently published a story about waterless washing. However, since I love quick detailing so much I felt we needed an article with tips specifically about quick detailing.
See, like I said in the intro, when your car is not perfectly clean but also not dirty enough it’s almost a shame to pull out the hose and perform a full wash. It’s kind of a waste actually. But at the same time you want the car to be perfectly clean for the weekend – specially if you are the car show or car meet type.
That’s when you pull out a bottle of car quick detailer spray and a dozen microfiber towels and get to work. I always have a few bottles of quick detailer spray in my garage along with a number of small Rubbermaid containers full of clean, nicely folded microfibers.
If you have a kit like this and you wash your microfibers immediately after, a quick detail session will take about 45 minutes to an hour if you take your time. A full wash might be just 15 minutes of sudsing, but it’s the entire process of getting the soap ready, the wash, the drying time and putting everything away that makes the process about twice as long as quick detailing. Not to mention, all the crevices of your car will be somewhat wet even after drying the car. Not good.
Anyway, keeping it quick. The process is simple. Spray a panel at a time and wipe it down very slowly with a folded microfiber. The action of the microfiber towel wipe is done with a rolling motion to pull off each dirty section of the towel as you wipe. Never wipe the paint again with a used section of towel. That’s why you fold the towel and more importantly, why you must have many microfiber rags for the job.
To top it off, you can do a final wipe with a clean microfiber to remove streaks or follow up with a layer of quick wax or liquid wax.
There are many more techniques you can learn about quick detailing – Many of them come with experience. However, this story is strictly for quick detailing tips to get you going.
What to use?
I talk about various quick detailing products in the waterless wash article mentioned at the beginning. For getting started in quick detailing you simply cannot go wrong with Meguiar’s Quik Detailer. Even though I use other products too, I still use Meg’s Quick Detailer very often.
You can order a bottle or two of Meguiar’s Quik Detailer using the link above. Ordering from our recommended links helps RallyWays as we get commission. Note that we only recommend products we use and love. For microfiber towels, just search around Amazon for ones that have good reviews and the price is right. Otherwise, just head on out to Target and pick up some there. I find they are pretty much the same as the lower-priced microfiber towels from the specialty detailing shops. It’s only when you look at borderless microfiber towels or other fluffy type where you start seeing a difference in both quality and price. But, for quick detailing, stick with moderately priced ones.
It’s too bad that Meguiar’s doesn’t sell Quik Detailer by the gallon. At least you can buy a 32oz bottle, which is not bad at all. The smaller 16 oz bottles are OK, but the 32 oz bottles are better for those who like to quick detail often. Watch it though… sometimes buying two 16 oz bottles can be cheaper than the single 32 oz bottle.
I have never tried the black bottle Meguiar’s Ultimate Quik Detailer, so I can’t comment there. I use the Ultimate Quik Wax (black bottle as well) all the time and it’s awesome. But I find the Ultimate Quik Detailer to be too expensive for something that will be used just for cleaning, so I stick with the cheap red bottle stuff for that.
Big thanks to Dani Devor for being our model. She’s not just a pretty face for car photos, she’s a real car enthusiast and that rad Mustang’s her car.
