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By tradition, middle class suburbanites would wash the car on Sunday morning before going for a drive with the family in the afternoon. Some individuals took this task earnestly, but for most it was twenty or thirty minutes washing and polishing the outside and five minutes with the vacuum cleaner inside. These days a great deal more people expect a proper cleaning that in those days was reserved for the well-off.

However, having your car detailed or valeted is still not cheap, typically costing $75 for an average job on an average sized car in average condition. When you begin talking about a grimy SUV that has just been used to transport the school football team, detailing properly at a decent establishment can cost $300-$400.

Not a lot of people can afford to pay that out often, especially with the price of petrol being what it is, so here are a couple of car detailing tips to help you do it yourself (or get the kids to do it for you).

i] Take out anything that can be removed and vacuum the carpets. Then wash the windows on the inside and clean the seats, upholstery and dash with an appropriate cleaner, particularly if the seats are covered in leather upholstery. Wash the things you removed, dry them and replace. Put a stick of slow-acting air freshener in the glove compartment and close all the doors.

2] Hose your car down, especially in the wheel arches and under the bonnet to remove the worst of the muck and soften up anything that has gone rock-solid. Do not use a really strong power washer, ie one that is attached to a powerful pump. These power washers can blast grit away so hard that it scratches the paintwork. A regular hose attached directly to the mains is fine

3] Check the mud under the wheel arch and blast it off with a slightly stronger jet if necessary. Do the wheels as well, if they are bad. When you can no longer see any build up of sludge, you can move on to the next stage.

4] Either mix a bucket of warm soapy water or fix a soap dispenser to your hose pipe. It is worth investing in proper car cleaner, because kitchen detergent could be a little harsh for your car’s paintwork.

Do not try to save money on the amount of detergent you use, follow the manufacturer’s recommendations and apply it with a sponge or mitten. If you are using a bucket, be ready to change the water several times - you do not want to start rubbing grit into your paintwork.

Wash the car in sections starting with the roof and then rinse it off immediately. So, wash the roof, rinse it; wash a door panel, rinse it; move on and around your car until you get to the bottom - the bumpers and wheels.. You have to rinse instantly to stop a film of soap drying onto the paintwork, especially on a hot day.

Re-rinse the entire car in case you missed something. If you purchased a car wash with wax included, you are done, but if you would like the best finish, now is the time to wax on and then wax off.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on many subjects, but is now concerned with auto interior detailing. If you want some tips on detailing cars come over to our website now at Detailing Car Interiors.

Do you drive about in style or in a sty? Do you take pride in your vehicle or are you going to wait for it to fall apart and then purchase a new one? Of course it is your car, you do what you want but a tidy car is safer than a grubby one.

If you have soda cans and empty potato chip packets rolling about the floor, they could interfere with your feet. If you do not keep the outer surface clean, rust will set in and your car will become less structurally sound - less able to endure a crash.

So here are seven suggestions to help you valet your car. They might not all be life-savers, but they ought to all relieve some frustration and make your driving experience a bit more enjoyable.

1] Keep your windows spotless and clear. You should have as much forward, rear and peripheral vision as possible. Remove anything dangling from the rear view mirror and swap big speakers on the rear shelf for low, flat ones.

Remove all stickers from the windows especially the dopey one that says: ‘Drive Safely - Baby On Board’. No one is going to drive more carefully because you have a baby with you, that is your job!

2] If your aerial jams, it is better to rub it with graphite powder than to squirt oil into it. The oil will only leak out and what stays will soon have dust sticking to it, which will cause it to stick more.

3] You will get better results when cleaning, waxing or polishing, if you spray the liquid onto your cloth rather than onto the car. Spraying directly onto the car creates puddles in some patches which usually result in smears and lots of extra rubbing, meanwhile coarse dust can be getting stuck on this surplus and the motion of your cleaning might cause scratches. You also lose less spray to the wind.

4] Whilst cleaning the glass, wipe up and down on one side of the glass and side-to-side on the other so that you can see where the streaks are. It could save you half the effort.

5] Clean bird droppings from your car as soon as you can. This is because they are very acidic and will attack your paintwork each time they become wet. Never park under a tree because of this and because the rain dripping through the tree, especially in warm weather, will bring sap or oil from the tree and it is quite hard to get rid of when it is dry.

6] When washing the exterior with a bucket of soapy water, begin on the roof, the bonnet and the boot; change the water and do one side of the car, change the water and do the other. Never throw the left over dirty water in the bucket onto the car or its wheels. This water is filthy, but you often see people do it.

7] Clean the engine from time to time. You will be glad you did if ever you have to get under the bonnet. The same goes for the spare wheel and keep an old pair of gloves in the wheel well for when you have to change a wheel.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on many topics, but is at present concerned with auto interior detailing. If you want some tips on detailing cars come over to our website now at Detailing Car Interiors.

A lot of individuals detail or wash their car for aesthetic reasons and that is all very well, but there are far more vital reasons for detailing one’s car. Most people spend roughly the same percentage of their money on a car. I mean that as people get a better job, they tend to buy a better car. Therefore a car is a sizable investment for most drivers.

It makes sense to safeguard one’s investments and even if you cannot make your car grow in value, you can at least take every measure in your power to reduce the speed of its depreciation. One of the foremost ways of doing this is by frequent maintenance and detailing a car ought to be regarded as part of your regular maintenance programme.

Car detailing as part of a maintenance programme also has a safety aspect. You expect that if your brakes are not serviced in the correct manner that there is a greater chance that they may fail one day and you should expect that if you do not take proper care of your car’s bodywork that it may rust and become less protective in case of a crash.

So having said that here are a few tips to help you protect your investment and perhaps even your life.

Windscreen wipers ought to be kept spotless and unworn at all times. Have you ever sat in a car with bad windscreen wipers whilst it is raining? It is very frightening. If it has not rained for a while, then you will not have noticed the dust and grit building up under the windscreen wiper blades.

This abrasive dirt will soon score your windscreen, especially if someone accidentally switches them on when it is not raining. A scratched windscreen is bad enough, but if the blades are worn, they will not clear the rain sufficiently for you to see properly either.

You should make a point or regularly lifting the blades from the windscreen and checking and cleaning them. You will soon see if the rubber is starting to perish or fray and you will also notice a line of solidified dust (or worse) on the glass. Wet both the wipers and the glass before attempting to clean them in order to soften up the dirt.

Use a sponge or chamois leather on the glass, but use an old rag on the rubber blades, because they can devastate a new sponge or costly chamois leather. Use this rag for cleaning other abrasive parts of the car like the wheels, number plates and bumpers.

When you are cleaning the windows of your car, it is a good idea to get into the practice of finishing the cleaning of the outside with vertical wipes and the inside with horizontal ones (or vice versa, if you like). This way you will know which side those maddening, and frequently distracting, smears are.

While we are on the topic, it is not a good idea to obstruct your vision by having furry dice or anything else hanging from your rear-view mirror. These symbols are meant to bring good luck and safety, but they are the exact opposite. Likewise nodding dogs and big speakers on the rear shelf are obtrusive and window stickers of any kind are silly. Transparent glass is meant to be seen through not looked at.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on lots of topics, but is at present concerned with auto interior detailing. If you want some tips on detailing cars come over to our website now at Detailing Car Interiors.