Hey everyone, I've been doing a lot of research on ways to improve upon my approach to properly caring for rumblebutt's (my black 997.1 4S) interior and exterior. I currently double-bucket wash, dry with a water blade and large "the absorber" towel, then wax. Between washes I maintain with a california duster and detail spray wipe-downs. On the interior, I use leather cleaner & conditioner in addition to plastic cleaner & protectant. I've intentionally left out the product names for the soap, wax, conditioner, etc. because that is one of the areas where I feel entirely in the dark.

So far, below are the big take-aways from what I've gleaned from our immensely informative posts so far:

1. Convert to a foam soak based wash approach.
2. Convert to drying with a leaf blower.
3. Incorporating a polish into my wax cycle.
4. Aquire legitimate detailing brushes.
5. Don't rush… if I'm short on time, accept that I cant finish it properly right now and allocate the necessary time to do it right on another day. No shortcuts.
6. Try to get out of the mindset that I can buy better products to compensate for my lack of technique. This mentality is not a conscious one but after watching a ton of videos and reading posts on technique, I realized that over the years I've tended to attempt to product buy my way up to a better result instead of sucking up my pride and practice instead of assuming that the poor results are from the use of an inferior product.

What do you guys think of the above?

At this point I feel like I still have a lot to learn and I'm anxious to start applying what I've already learned but I can't help but get hung up on which products to go with. I've created an excel file to catalog recommendations based on product category with the intent being to tally up the most popular recommendations to form my buy list but I'm finding while a particular product may have been wildly popular a year ago, it may have significantly fallen from grace in the past 2 months.

Once I realized my spreadsheet based approach was futile, I figured I'd instead ask you guys what you would purchase if someone happened to wipe you clean of your products but happened to leave your tools. Lets say you had $300 to spend and did not need to worry about paint correction or plastic restoration, this budget would be purely for protecting and maintaining both interior and exterior.

Thanks in advance for any advice you can give me!

-Mike

 

[Try to get out of the mindset that I can buy better products to compensate for my lack of technique. This mentality is not a conscious one but after watching a ton of videos and reading posts on technique, I realized that over the years I've tended to attempt to product buy my way up to a better result instead of sucking up my pride and practice instead of assuming that the poor results are from the use of an inferior product]

Well stated...

Proceed with this in mind; the products you use constitute a very small factor in the equation. Application methodology and technique constitute 95%; the reasoning behind the choice of quality products is to eliminate any limiting factors, thus enabling you to place emphasis on technique used. Fundamentally the most important thing about products is how they perform.


As far as product choices I would definitely consider Optimum Polymer Technologies Opti-Coat for paint protection, 1z einszett Plastic Deep Cleaner or Iz C o c k pit Premium for interior care and Optimum Opti™ Clean a one-step product that cleans and protects all automotive surfaces in a single step, paint, vinyl, rubber, metals, plastics, and even glass..

TOGWT® Autopia Detailing Wiki articles - http://www.autopia.org/forum/autopia...yperlinks.html

If you have any questions about the care or renovation techniques used for automotive detailing, please let me know