This is part of the Vehicle Preserve and Protect series of articles, covering the tools and techniques for taking care of your vehicle.
Microfiber Towels
You’ll need a lot of towels. Avoid the generic bulk towels from your local store, or the cheapest on the Internet. You want good towels to protect your car’s finish, particularly after polishing. Never use paper towels on your painted surfaces.
“GSM” – grams per square meter – is how you grade towel softness. Higher GSM numbers mean more softness, and the range is 300 GSM for utility towels to 650 GSM for the plushest towels (for your supercar’s paint).
Use only “tagless” and “edgeless” towels, or ones with a very soft edge, like the general-purpose utility towels from Ethos. From Ethos, a good general-purpose towel is sold with their Graphene Matrix coating kits. During final polishing and afterward, only use high-GSM (450+) towels on the paint surface, or ones that are supplied with coating kits.
Get a range of colors and grades of softness, and use each color and softness for different purposes. For instance, a Blue waffle-weave towel for glass, Yellow GSM 300 for interior, Black GSM 300 for tires and engine, Red GSM 600 for use on final “jewel” polishing, and perhaps Purple GSM 450 for one-step and Green GSM 350 compounding. Keeping them for separate purposes reduces the chance of marring your paint finish or transferring gunk between surfaces.
Get these or similar for general use, in a few colors: All-Purpose Microfiber Towels. Esoteric has good prices for microfiber, too, and are high-quality Towels. You also save money when you buy in bulk.
To prevent swirls and scratches on polished cars, towels with GSM 450 or higher should be all that ever touches the paint: Esoteric Red Premium Towel or The Rag Company has great towels that will do the trick. You don’t want to scratch your newly-polished paint, but if it isn’t a $100k Cadillac, don’t break the bank on a lot of super-plush towels.
If a towel gets dirty in use or hits the floor, remove any debris in the towel and get a new one – that towel is done for now. Wash it before reuse, downgrade it to a utility purpose if it is damaged or worn out, or toss it.
Wash microfibers before their first use.
Machine-wash microfiber towels separate from any clothes, cotton towels, etc.; washing microfiber towels with non-microfiber fabric causes the microfibers to grab and hold on to all the other stuff (cotton fibers, etc.) and they will not be as effective. You likely don’t want to wash automotive things with your clothes, anyway. If you do a lot of work mobile or from a home garage, having a separate washing machine for microfibers helps prevent contamination of your clothes.
Wash with medium heat water, or rarely, high heat when necessary. Tumble dry on low heat, or air dry. The tumble-dryer step helps generate static cling and is how the towels work. Never use softener in the washer or dryer; you want the static.
Use laundry detergent free of any additives, or use a microfiber-specific wash. We’ll use both detergents if the towels are filthy.
Drying Towels and Blowers
Unless you are using a water de-ionizing system for a final rinse of your vehicle, you need to dry it immediately after washing. This is especially critical if you are working outdoors or have high mineral levels in your water, as a cloudy situation can change rapidly and damage the paint and glass.
Water always has some level of dissolved solids. Here in the midwest, this seems especially true. Left to its own, Lake Michigan should be making a lot of limestone. The lime, when it dries in a water droplet magnified by the sun, will leave behind a water-spot ring. This may be hard or impossible to remove, depending on the chemistry of the deposit, the surface of your vehicle, and how long the spot was left on the surface. The longer it sits, the more it embeds into your surface and may require machine polishing to remove.
Use a high-quality microfiber-based towel specifically made for drying your vehicle. It is surprising how much water these seemingly small towels can absorb and remove from your car. It doesn’t take long to dry, and even if the car might be out in the rain later, you’ve removed the hard water used in the rinse and protected the finish.
For coated and waxed vehicles you may be able to use a leaf blower or something like the Bigboi blower that provides heated air to aid in the process. Compressed air can also help remove water from surfaces and crevices alike. Use a rubber-tipped nozzle if available to prevent accidental marring of the vehicle.
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