Recommended products

[HDi fun]

This thread is not ro be used for advertising purposes. It's simply to tell others of our experiences with aftermarket car care and maintenance products.

I'll nominate a couple.

1. Auto Bulbs Direct's own brand windscreen wipers. I recently bought a pair for the BMW and these are car specific blades. £4.88 each inc VAT. Total for the pair was under £11 incl. delivery. And they are brilliant. Superior to Bosch blades.

2. W5 screenwash concentrate. Available from Lidl at just £0.99 for 250ml but dilutes 100:1 to make a staggering 25 litres. Don't think it has any anti-freezing properties but apart from winter use it's brilliant.

 

[aston]

I pretty much go by the auto express recommendations They seem to be pretty thorough with thier testing. Though anything I buy usually lasts years as I normally only clean the exterior twice, the day I buy and the day I decide to sell.
http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/products/products/archive/
http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/products/

 

[MasterAuron]

Collonite 476S, incredibly durable for the money. A superb winter wax.

AG SRP. You won't get better results by hand over the whole car with any other polish.

 

[HDi fun]

Are these easy to apply, or at least, not overly time consuming?

I really do struggle bending down to do lower parts of paintwork.

What I need is the opposite of a convertible. Keep the roof, bonnet, boot and door tops and chop out all the lower bodywork

So if I had a car which had no painted bodywork lower down I'd be able to deal with it properly.

 

[MasterAuron]

Wax on, wax off young grasshopper

With a polish you have to apply a bit of light pressure and breaking them down can be labour intensive by hand but SRP is by far the easiest to work out of all the polishes I've used.

 

[HDi fun]

Wax on, wax off young grasshopper

With a polish you have to apply a bit of light pressure and breaking them down can be labour intensive by hand but SRP is by far the easiest to work out of all the polishes I've used.

Thankyou.

Something I am interested in is this claying business.

The paintwork on my ancient E39 looks immaculate and water beads perfectly. However, to the touch it does feel slightly coarse even when fully clean. Is it surface deposits causing this, and if so, am I right in saying that a clay treatment would remove this so I can get it mirror smooth?

It doesn't appear to need polishing as such.

 

[obi_waynne]

Yes HDI, clay is the stuff you need for this. Some spots of tar are best removed with a mild solvent but most of it will be just "gunk" and clay does a great job on these.

I vote for radweld, it does what it says on the tin and really does work well.

 

[MasterAuron]

Yes but claying is very time consuming and labour intensive as you're using a clay bar with a surface of about 2" x 2" to go over the whole car! You'll need to polish it afterwards too because you'll more than likely get micro-marring. Then of course you're going to need to wax it afterwards so you'll looking at the full treatment if you clay it, but once it's done it's done.

If waxed properly and often you shouldn't need to clay it again for a couple of years at a push. You only need to wax it every six months too if you use something durable like the Collonite and give it a couple of coats.

 

[HDi fun]

I just use that Turtle Wax - Wax It Wet stuff at the moment. Not bad but very unlikely to be as resilient like a proper hard wax properly applied.

I think I need to save up some pennies and pay someone to sort it out properly for me. Gotta be a day's work hasn't it? The bodywork is immaculate and I'd like to keep it that way because I keep my cars for ages.