Like all great artists, auto detailers have their own secrets of the trade that help them get cars looking beautiful. While you’ll be able to learn a lot of those secrets during your auto detailing training, we thought we’d share just a few tips now that will help you become the best auto detailer you can be.
Microfibre Cloths Are Essential to Auto Detailing
Do yourself a favor and avoid using old rags near the body of any car you clean. Those coarse fibres can damage the paint and cause scratches. Today just about everybody who pursues an auto detailing career uses microfibre cloths. And they don’t just have one or two cloths on hand, they usually have dozens. They need separate cloths for washing and drying and for different parts of the vehicle. You may even want to buy cloths in different colours and keep each colour for different tasks. Make sure you wash your microfibre cloths separately too, otherwise they could attract cotton and other abrasive fibres from lower quality textiles.
Always Use Two Buckets of Water to Clean the Exterior
Auto detailers, it turns out, share a lot more with artists than just a passion for beauty. If you’ve ever watched a watercolour painter at work, you’ll notice they always have two cups of water on hand: one to clean off dirty brushes and the other to apply clean water to the canvas. If they only used one cup of water, they’d be smearing dirty water all over their painting! The same principle applies when you’re washing the exterior of a car. You’ll want one bucket on hand so that you have clean water to apply to the car and another bucket of water to rinse off the dirt from your mitt. If you used one bucket for both cleaning the car and rinsing your mitt, you would be spreading dirty water on the vehicle.
Take Care of the Trim First in Your Auto Detailing Career
You’ll learn in your auto detailing training that different materials on a vehicle need to be treated with different products. The trim is a case in point. The wax and polish that are used on the rest of the body can actually damage and stain some types of trim. So how do you prevent that from happening? One option is to cover the trim with masking tape so that wax and polish don’t come in contact with it. Another option is to treat the trim before you treat the rest of the vehicle. The trim protectant will repel the wax and polish used on the rest of the car, thus ensuring no unsightly stains develop.
Do you love cars and want to turn your passion into a rewarding career?
Contact Automotive Training Centres today to learn more about our auto detailing courses.
