Spring Cleaning

Every year my cars get a pretty thorough going over. I thought I'd post this year's process for everyone. Note that this is a car that lives outside, not garaged. So for a nine year old car, I'm pretty happy with how well the finish is holding up. I used the same on my 2001.5 Audi S4, which looked almost factory perfect when I sold it after 250,000 miles and countless track days.

My '07 e91 has just about 100k on it, and Alpine White is no treat to keep clean in winter. Luckily we don't salt the roads here in western Washington, so I have zero corrosion and the damage to the paint is minimal.

This year I began the process by washing the whole car top to bottom with Dawn dishwashing detergent. An old friend was the biochemist that designed Dawn's formula. She told me it would strip just about any wax or sealer off a car. Ever since I learned this I have made it the first step in my annual process.

After two complete two-bucket washings with Dawn I'm ready to decontaminate the paint.

I use Iron-X to remove all the pad and rotor debris that gets bedded into the paint over the course of the year, and it's really amazing to see how much comes out from the paint.

The purple is the iron getting dissolved by the Iron-X.

After decontamination I follow up with a clay bar. I've been using Griot's clay for years and it pretty effortlessly pulls a huge amount of crap out of the paint with minimal effort.

Once complete I wash the car again with Gtechniq's G-Wash as the inital step in the preparation for final paint correction. I really love Gtechniq's car wash. It's got an anti-static formulation that does a good job of keeping the surface clean for a few days, and it's easy on any wax or sealant protection that may be on the car.

Here's the clay'd car after washing:

It was at this point that I realized my bottle of Sonax Profiline Perfect Finish was empty, which gives me a good excuse to order up a couple new finishing pads as well.

Thursday I'll re-wash the car & start the polish, then follow up with Gtechniq's C2v3 Sealant for the corrected paint and glass. I'll update this post with images of the process and results for everyone.

By Friday I should be all prepped for the BMW Centennial celebration in a few days.

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Spring Cleaning