Car paint—how to protect it in autumn and winter?

In winter conditions, car paint is exposed to many challenges. Frost, snow, mud and salt cause rusting of the chassis and matting and mechanical damage to the body. Only comprehensive actions can ensure that in spring our car will be free of unsightly coatings, chips and visible signs of corrosion.

How to care for your car’s paint?

Perfect protection of your car’s paint requires precision, care, and commitment. However, it is not burdensome or difficult to perform. Comprehensive paint protection for winter can be completed in a few basic steps:

• thorough car washing,
• claying,
• polishing,
• waxing.

Body washing

Washing your car before final waxing is an extremely important step in maintaining the high quality of your car paint. If we want to wash the car properly, we need to choose the most appropriate place for this purpose. Many municipalities have introduced a ban on washing cars, even on their own property. Saturday washing at the river is a thing of the past. Therefore, the best place is an automatic or manual car wash.

Automatic car wash

An automatic car wash is generally available at virtually every gas station. Its operation does not require special skills or physical effort. This is a cheap and quite popular service. Unfortunately, it also has disadvantages. In case of heavy use and infrequent maintenance and adjustment of washing devices, it may not clean the bodywork, spread sand on the paint, damage the coating and cause characteristic circular scratches. If it is very dirty, pre-washing may not prepare the car for the next stages of car paint protection in autumn and winter.

Manual wash

The touchless manual car wash is equipped with a high-pressure washer. It does not allow you to refine the effect with a sponge or brush. This provides medium-quality surface cleaning, largely depending on the skill of the washer operator. Touchless car wash is easily accessible, cheap and popular.

Cleaning car paint yourself

Washing the car’s paint yourself (in a designated place) gives the best results. A well-prepared site should be protected from direct sunlight, have a drain into the city sewage system and have a concrete surface. It is best to schedule the washing in the morning so that the car is not hot. It shouldn’t be colder than 15 degrees Celsius outside — especially if waxing is planned. To wash your car, you can use sponges , brushes, a microfiber cloth or a sheep’s wool glove.

Car paint care

Every driver knows that you need to use car shampoo to wash your car . It should have appropriate national certificates. The perfect consistency of the preparation, economical capacity and even the smell are important to achieve the effect. The appropriate agent should not only remove impurities, but also pre-gloss the bodywork. This is especially important if you wash your car frequently. A well-chosen shampoo should also maintain the effect for a long time. Waxing shampoos and antistatic agents are becoming more and more popular . As long as they are used in accordance with the instructions, they will give a high-quality effect. Active cleaning foams also produce interesting effects .

What should you definitely NOT use?

• Dishwashing liquid
  Although liquids foam and are delicate, they usually cause surfaces to become dull and streaky. If they contain vinegar or fruit acids, they may even accelerate the development of corrosion.
• Floor liquid
  You can use them to achieve the right effect. Unfortunately, maintaining varnish with floor cleaners requires significant physical effort. Moreover, these cleaning agents do not have the recommended pH7 and both alkaline and acidic reactions can damage the paint and accelerate corrosion.
• Cleansing milks Cleansing
  milks are gentle cleaning agents. Unfortunately, they contain abrasive particles that have a negative impact on the bodywork polish.
• Descalers, bleaches and other harsh cleaning agents
  . In short, these compounds are deadly to the car. Aggressive cleaning products can quickly and permanently discolor car paint.

Claying the paint

After the initial washing of the car body, we must remove strongly attached dirt, resin coating, coating from worn brake pads, asphalt particles, etc. Even when the car looks clean, we may feel roughness under our hands. These are impurities that will be removed by a process called claying.

Claying the varnish can be done yourself, indoors and at a temperature that will keep the clay flexible. Before starting cleaning, we must moisten the body with a specialist product with a neutral Ph or water with a high-quality car shampoo. Use a torn piece of clay, formed into a cake with a diameter of approx. 5 cm, to rub the body gently, without pressure, vertically or horizontally and always in the same direction. Claying should be performed simultaneously on as small surfaces as possible. If the molded clay visibly glides on the paint, it means that the body section has been completely cleaned.

If it is difficult to carry out professional claying, you can use a strong agent to remove difficult dirt such as tar, resin, asphalt.

How to polish car paint?

Polishing your car’s paint is definitely the most labor-intensive part of the process of protecting it against fall and winter. It requires precision, decisive movements and a lot of energy. You need to use a separate agent for polishing metal elements and a separate one for polishing plastics. A microfiber cloth or chamois cloth is best for polishing. Rotary and oscillating polishers are also recommended. While manual polishing is time-consuming and tiring, mechanical polisher requires some skill in use. However, they produce sufficiently high revolutions, which result in a polished surface like a mirror.

Waxing

Waxing is the final step in protecting your car’s paint. It not only refreshes the color, makes it shiny and prevents it from matting and oxidizing. The wax layer also fills micro-cracks, which protects the bodywork against the spread of possible corrosion. Therefore, it affects the technical condition of the bodywork. Therefore, it is worth approaching the topic of waxing appropriately. The treatment can be entrusted to specialized companies or performed on your own.

When waxing yourself, it is best to gently polish the car before applying layers of the agent . This will remove dust and maintain high quality clay cleaning. Dry or wet polishing paste should be applied with a sponge in circular movements. It is worth putting effort into this activity, as it is the final preparation of the sheet metal for waxing, which means protecting the paint against autumn and winter.

When starting waxing, it is recommended to buy high-quality wax. Only this way will allow you to apply sufficiently thin layers of the preparation to the bodywork. Low-quality wax often creates streaks and may delaminate and peel. The most popular waxes are in the form of paste, milk and oil. Milks and oils are recommended for new cars. Cars with visible signs of use are best waxed with paste.

Waxing is best carried out on sunny days, with a temperature of 15–20 degrees Celsius. In autumn and winter, it is worth using a closed, heated room. In the heat, the wax dries quickly and softens. It is especially difficult to spread using the wet technique. However, at low temperatures, the wax becomes too hard and the layers dry quickly, often clumping together. It is also best to use it on small areas. Start by preparing the roof, then wax individual doors and the hood. Wax can be applied to the bodywork in two ways: dry or wet.

Dry waxing

Requires the car to be thoroughly wiped down first. This is a more tedious process and usually involves applying the paste. The advantage of this method is better control of the amount of agent used and an ideal effect.

Wet waxing

It is faster and does not require drying the body. The product in the milk and oil is easier to spread. It penetrates all the recesses and covers the body with a thin layer that is easy to polish.

After waxing, it is worth gently polishing the surface. However, if we do not have the experience, willingness or access to high-quality products, we recommend considering whether to entrust waxing and polishing to a specialized company. A professional workshop will do it quickly, effectively, but unfortunately not cheaply.

A car prepared in this way will survive every autumn and winter. The car will regain its shine, and the paint protection will be adequate and professional.