Like Cleaning Your Car? It's Time To Ditch The Fancy Clay Bars And Get A Proper Polishing Wheel

Pride in a shiny ride is the glue that binds all car enthusiasts together. It doesn’t matter if you’re team JDM or American muscle, German sedans or Italian exotics. Even big rig drivers like to polish their trucks after a long day on the road.

As far as I’m concerned, detailing is the only true definitive indicator of a proper auto enthusiast. You don’t have to wrench on cars or buy go-fast parts. Hell, the car doesn’t even need to be fast. But if you enjoy spending a warm afternoon making your ride shine like the diamond it is, then congrats. You are officially a car enthusiast.

I’m willing to bet a lot of you bust out a clay bar every so often to pull sap, crud, and other contaminants out of the finish. And then you have the really expensive “deep” cleaning products that are ultra-formulated with hydrologic kryptonex unobtanium bonding agents to protect paint against bugs, UV rays and wayward meteors striking from outer space. I’ve encountered plenty of car guys who spend days with such products, meticulously cleaning their rides over and over. I suppose there’s really nothing wrong with that.

Well, aside from it being a monumental waste of time, especially when you can do so much better with a high-speed polishing wheel. I spent six years as a professional auto detailer for a used car dealership. The only time I spent a weekend spiffing up a car is when I had to gut the entire interior to remove enough dog hair to make another dog. Even the dirtiest car with the worst looking paint only ever took me the better part of a day to make awesome.

The reason I want you to put down the clay and bevy of high-dollar polishes is very simple. Products can clean the car, but a high-speed polishing wheel can do the same thing much quicker, and it can actually mend a damaged finish. And if a car is more than a few months old, the finish probably has some damage even if you can’t see it directly. Not only will mending that give you a better shine, it will also make the car easier to clean and shine in the future.

To better explain this, let’s talk about hockey. Yes, hockey.

The skaters hit the rink for 20 minutes, and when they break for intermission, out comes the Zamboni to smooth the ice. Why smooth the ice? Because 20 minutes of skating scars it up with cuts and ridges that make it harder to skate. The paint job on your car is just like the ice - months of driving creates microscopic cuts and ridges that you can’t necessarily see, but they can still dull the shine. More importantly, those cuts and ridges catch and hold contaminants like tar, sap, sand, road grime, and industrial fallout - tiny metallic particles that will create tiny rust specs in the paint.

You can take a clay bar to the finish and remove those contaminants, but the clay doesn’t do anything about the ridges in the paint that hold them. Often times, running the clay over the paint actually does more damage, even if you use a lubricating spray. The very best hand applied products won’t help either, and actually, such products can be very tough to remove if the paint is full of those microscopic cuts and ridges. Ever applied a coat of wax that just didn’t want to buff back out? Now you know why.

That’s why I skip all those products and just go right to my trusty wheel. It will remove contaminants just like the clay, but it’s also a Zamboni for the paint - smoothing everything back out for a nice shine. Not only that, once you get used to the wheel you can remove large visible scuffs and scratches, refinish faded plastic, shine up rubber trim, and polish glass. With a buffing wheel and a bit of experience, you can give new life to flat, sun damaged paint jobs most would consider beyond saving. It’s a skill every proper petrolhead should know because it’s not that hard to do well, and thusly equipped, you can work detailing miracles no driveway warrior with a clay bar or hand-applied wax ever could.

The downside? If you’re not careful you could literally burn the paint off your car, but don’t fret. That only applies when using aggressive compounds and higher speeds to really attack damaged paint. Don’t be scared to give it a try; as long as you use a fluffy wool pad, keep the speed on its lowest setting and use a basic, non-abrasive cleaner wax, you’ll have a better chance of winning the lottery than mucking up the paint. Do be mindful of rubber trim though; odds are you still won’t scuff it up at low speed, but it’s far more sensitive to such things than paint. And be careful around edges - paint is always thinner on edges.

And that’s how you get started in the wonderful world of detailing with a high-speed polishing wheel. You can find decent quality polishers for less than £70 or $100, and pads usually cost you a tenner. Spend some time, go slow and get used to the nuances of a wheel. Gradually start working up to higher speeds and abrasive compounds, and you’ll be able to turn this:

Into this:

That was a 1991 Ford Taurus SHO I bought for $400 at an auction. I replaced the missing grille obviously, and new headlight lenses came shortly after this photo. I dabbed a bit of black touch up paint on the front bumper, but the rest was accomplished by a day of wet sanding and buffing. Let’s see a clay bar and magick formula ultra 5000 wet shine wax do that.

Got detailing questions or tips? The nice thing about detailing is that it’s subjective - there are a hundred ways to make a car shine and they all work. Let’s hear your techniques.