Depending on where you park, pollen can be a real problem if you’re trying to keep your car clean and shiny – it leaves a chalky, yellow film that can make a black car look terrible, puts your precious paint at risk of permanent damage and can also trigger some allergies.
How Pollen Can Damage Your Paint
Unfortunately, pollen sticks and bonds to auto paint. If you wait for that to happen, it’s not easily removed with a regular car wash – and can make your paint feel like 80-grit sandpaper after you’ve washed it. Make sure you use the appropriate cleaning products with a sufficient amount of lubrication and a microfiber towel to really pick up the dirt and pull it into the towel. Otherwise, you will put fine little micro scratches into your paint.
Can Pollen Damage Be Prevented?
The best way to prevent damage is keeping your car in a garage. Pollen is naturally airborne, so if that’s not an option, there’s not much you can do to really prevent it from accumulating on a car. It’s ESSENTIAL to keep a good coat of wax or synthetic sealant on the paint at all times. This will help to prevent things from sticking quite as dramatically to the paint surface and should make cleanup easier each time you do it. If you don’t let your car get really dirty, you should be able to wipe it off fairly easily (assuming it was properly waxed ahead of time).
How to Clean Your Car
If you are going to clean your car, park it in the shade on a cool surface. If you spray a mist-like cleaning product onto hot paint it will evaporate almost immediately, rendering it pretty useless.
Always work from the top of the car down, when cleaning it. Let it soak. You’re going to want to wet the area reasonably well.
With a standard quick detail spray, it’s just a quick mist onto the panel and you wipe with a towel. Let the product sit a couple seconds before you wipe. Fold your towel. Fold the towel into quarters and wipe in a straight line. On the leading edge of the towel there will be a line of dirt. Roll the edge back a little so the dirt stripe is pulled out of the way. If you do it properly three or four times, you end up with tiger stripes on the towel.
Now, use a follow-up towel. Take a second towel that’s also folded in quarters. Wipe back over the area with that fresh, clean towel just to pull off the last bit of product.
Now swap towels. Once your towel gets to the point that you feel it is no longer safe to use because there’s so much dirt embedded in it, set it aside. Turn your second towel into your primary towel and grab another clean towel for your secondary wipe.
Be prepared with multiple towels. Good quality microfiber towels are designed to grab and hold onto dirt, to pull it up into the towel so that it’s no longer interacting with your paint. They are also nice and soft, and therefore less likely to cause scratches. Don’t be afraid to use three, four, five, six towels depending on how big or dirty your car is.
DO NOT Scrub
One thing you never want to do is scrub hard. Scrubbing hard on your paint is simply never a good idea. Let the ingredients in the car wash soap or spray wash do their job and break down and emulsify that dirt so you can safely remove it from the surface.
Source: Gear Patrol
