Best Carwash Technique: 15 Steps + Tools

what's up guys today I'm working on the most important car I've ever worked on in my entire life and that of course is my wife's car 2009 Subaru Outback now my wife and I went away and you can see the cars pretty dirty and it's been burned bird bombed everywhere we went hiking and rock climbing and do all those outdoors you know kind of activities that we do and it's really really filthy so today we're going to talk about the step by step chronological order of how to properly wash your car now I've done a few videos piecemeal here and there I'm going to go through all the steps we're going to talk about all the tools so this might be a little bit of a longer video so what I'm going to do is right here you'll see a little number hopefully appearing and I'm going to number each one so if there's something you need to skip just skip ahead from 3 to 5 or whatever so you can do that little caveat I also want to tell you we are not talking about compounding we're not talking about polishing we're not detailing the car we're doing a very proper wash on a very dirty car so your car may not be dirty I would probably guess that it's not as dirty as this so you may have to skip a few steps but I want to show you the full mortgage Bourg of things to do and you can pick and choose the one that works for you so that a lot more come up on this episode of ride alone step one is by far the most overlooked of the wash process yet it's the easiest walk around the car and assess the level of dirt is there any tar anywhere a new rock chip or maybe a new door ding you didn't see spend one minute looking at the car to help you form a proper game plan all right so you've walked around your car and you've taken a quick look and you've assessed what's going on now the reason I make a lot of people are encourage people to do that is to look down at the bottom here sometimes you'll find some tar or some foreign thing that you don't want to wash with your wash because then it gets in there and it just gets all gummed up but it's not good to just take 20 seconds walk around like okay everything looks normal dirty and you're good to go grab a lot of the tools now I want to describe to you the basic tools for a for a wash and we'll get into more complicated things going along all right so we have our three bucket method right first bucket here is our wash mitt and I'll show you inside here just like every bucket there's grit guards in fact I put two grit guards all the way in so that they sit on top of each other so instead of just one mitt and the bottoms down here I put two so it actually gives you that much more space to kind of keep all the gunk on the bottom it's you know and these things are super cheap so so I have great guards on the bottom of all these this one here is going to be designated soap so this is your foam your foam paint cleanser and then in this one over here is just going to be clear clean water to dunk the wash mitt right everybody sort of gets that on this side I have a designated bucket for the wheels you never mix the two of these these two two go together and this is the wheel bucket the wheel block remember all this gunk that's on here that little you know things that are very very sharp little pieces of metal you don't want to get that on your Pinkus for obvious reasons you're going to scratch now in here for the wheels I have mud tires shine that's for later but you're going to use brute wheel soap so there's a difference between the foam which is soap for the paint and brute which is soap for the wheels very important this is much stronger to get in there then you're going to use plumb you're going to spray it on there we'll talk about that in a minute and mud afterwards for the fires inside the inside the wheel bucket we have wheel Woolley a medium wheel Willie we have a small little tiny wheel Willie and more importantly the lug nut brush all these things you can find links to on my website I have a little wash mitt as well and of course a grit card on the bottom so these we got over here we have a foam gun we're going to use that in a few minutes again link on the website you need microfiber towels as well and I'm assuming a vacuum again we'll go into these a little bit more if I wanted to give you just a little bit of heads up because I'm going to start speeding up now alright next step engine for step to open the hood and assess the level of dirt does it need a simple wipe down or fold degreasing in my case it clearly needs an all-purpose cleaner be sure the engine is cool to warm but not hot next remove any big leaves or sticks caught in the hood jams and be sure to quickly cover any sensitive electrical parts with a plastic bag the cleaning tools you'll use are from your wheel bucket the lug nut brush wheel wash mitt and the wheel Willie can all be used during the engine cleaning process use three squirts of brut wheel soap and fill the bucket about half to three quarters with water then quickly and lightly rinse the engine to remove the majority of the loose dirt be sure to wear protective gloves when working on your engine spray AP cleaner a citrus degreaser on the heavily soiled areas and agitate with your lug nut brush before the area has time to dry lightly rinse the now suspended dirt away afterwards use compressed air or the Master Blaster to drive the engine along with an old microfiber towel finally remember to remove the plastic protection then close the hood but not all the way we will need to open it again later step 3 remove the rubber floor mats and put them aside for now be sure to avoid spilling the dirt back into the carpet fibers as it will just cause more work for you later ok so onto the next step if you skip the engine cleaning part that totally makes sense probably about 50% of you are going to skip that most of the time because you clean your engine I don't know every couple of months this one was really bad so if you skip that one then this would be the first step when you're just coming for your car it's time to clean it you're going to work on the wheels first we're going to chat a little bit about a I guess you call a little controversy on how to clean wheels or how to start cleaning wheels step number one or no controversy number one is you rinse the wheels down with water really heavy water try to knock a lot of work dirt off then you put your cleaner and a lot of people say hey don't do that because it's only diluting the cleaner ok so now step or controversy 2 or option 2 let's call it would be dry like it is right now take your cleaner spray your cleaner in there let it sit and then take the water afterwards and rinse it down so do you see the separation between the two you're asking yourself which one do you choose well I typically like to rinse the the wheel down first for safety and knock a lot of the junk off then I put the cleaner on my reason for that is anytime you use a cleaner that is powerful enough to take off junk without having to agitate it you just put it on there and the chemical eats everything away real quick and it the wheel looks amazing but you didn't have to really rub it or you know or agitate it for me that's a chemical that's too strong I am I want to just to take my brushes and get in there and clean it out I need the the product to just loosen it and then I'll push it away so that's my theory on it to each his own also want to make the point that if you have winter mats like these here you should take them out right now because you're going to when you're done doing all four wheels I also clean the mitt the the little grooves of this thing with the the tools that I have it for the wheels and obviously not going to use the same tools that use on the paint you're going to use it look how dirty look out nasty this is so just keep that amount you want to keep flowing and keep this wash as efficient as possible alright so let's hop into the steps now cleaning wheels effectively is a very systematic approach beginning with a heavy initial rinse of the rim real well and rubber next I apply a mo plumb wheel cleaner based on the level of dirt present three squirts five or maybe even ten depending on your condition immediately afterwards start with a big wheel Wooley at twelve o'clock so that the soap and dirt runs down the inner barrel to avoid double work then follow up with the lug nut brush for those tight areas and a quick wipe of the rubber then use the wheel wash mitt to clean behind the rim spokes finally use the wheel Woolies to clean the inner wheel well then rinse the wheel and move to the next one when you finish all four wheels doing one wheel out of time then rinse and scrub the rubber floor mats and leave them in the shade to dry you see some rubber will have weird watermark stains if allowed to bake and dry in the Sun so do your best to avoid that ok on to the next step as you can see the wheels look great tires fantastic we're going to come back later and we're going to touch the wheels up i with a cloth we'll talk about that later and we're going to put mud tire gel on it and we'll play with the engine we're gonna do all that later so the next step now is just preparing for the wash just bucket over here has this crazy wash mitt again you can find a link on the website it's important look look down the bottom that you see how it's nice and white well show you that after the wash I will show you how effective these grit guards are so I have to grit guards in there this is going to be my empty one with milk but no nothing in it just can be water my rinse this is amol foam I'm going to take three squirts one on the towel on the mitt itself one on the bottom you can put one on the other side or you can put one inside the actual wash mitt as well so that's kind of the little trick that I use there no soap in here and of course you guys know the foam gun now when you use the foam gun you're going to fill it up about a third of the way or maybe a quarter of the way you're going to fill the bottom of it now shot another video I'll put a little link on right here when I did a Corvette here I talked about the foam gun you can change how much foam comes out but I will warn you you're going to use a lot more material when you do use this again this is another link on there so I'm going to use this and I'll show you how to use this again real quick but so let's fill these things up so it's very important fill these up before we notice we haven't rinsed the card out no water is it why do you do that because if it's super sunny out which it isn't right now is it's getting late in the day if you rinse down the car and then you come around here and you start monkeying around with all these things and it takes you 20 minutes the water on the car is going to dry you potentially could get water spots so I'm going to show you why I don't get water spots anymore with a filter that I have over here okay so here's one of my favorite things and my wife thinks I'm completely nuts because I rinsed my car down I wash it down with the most filtered beautiful water ever and I love it so when we talked about water spots back there what's happening is the calcium and all the junk that comes out of the regular faucet here for the hose has stuff in it and when it dries it dries on your on your paint and can cause some problems I don't have that problem anymore because I have the spotless water system unbelievable stuff as you can see here two massive canisters with filters in them that still throw all the junk out before it goes all the way out to my car so super geeky but I love it no water spots ever with this uh this tool here pretty cool for step six fill both the soap and clean water buckets first before pre rinsing the paint top-to-bottom I also like to rinse the undercarriage for every wash as well not just in the winter step 7 use a foam gun to pre-soak the paint to help loosen and carry away the dirt safely if you feel your car is not that dirty or you have very hard paint you may want to skip this step step 8 dunk the wash mitt in the soap bucket and always start at the top and work your way lower but watch the next segment for the exact wash pattern to minimize scratching hey guys I'm behind the camera I stopped in the middle of washing because I wanted to make a very important point we all know that we should start with the top right I'm gonna use this side as an example so we start with the top that's number one go all the way back and forth and I do the glass all right it's number two do the front here three no half the glass whatever I can reach top here for now between three and four I'm rinsing right so now cuz I don't like the hood to get the hood gets a little bit more dirty than normal so rinse rinse so I rinse this one right to do it and then now I have five I do the fender and this is a perfect example so this is what I was thinking of this little wine here so I do everything above the line so then I come back this way do everything above the line and then I'll go around the car and do the same thing on the other side so I'm kind of really going top down but I'm doing side-to-side layering what you don't want to hit first is here so essentially you want to hit this and that black piece at the very very end and I like to save the back for the end as well there's usually lots of soot and junk from the exhaust or whatever so that's sort of the pattern very quick recap roof roof window glass glass glass glass re dunk clean do the nose here again I didn't go down to the front bumper right but do that yet then I do this dunk again depending on how dirty it is I do this this this pattern right here this pattern right here and then I repeat it on the other side now when you're done with all that stuff all that's left is the bumper you know the back area here the bumper and this lower part and the front part here there's no other way I could explain it instead get behind the camera so that's the steps that you would do in terms of washing make sense and when the wash process is complete rinse the soap away now that your car is wet from the rinse fold a clean dry microfiber towel into fours then soak the towel in fresh hose water afterwards ring out the towel so it's damp but not wet and spray three squirts of ammo hydrate lately on the towel next wipe the wet paint and straight lines to remove the water and wring out the towel as it becomes full this will add vital lubrication and protection during the drying phase adopting this process will change the way you think about drying your paint and the immediate depth that creates is amazing now that the outside is dry open up the doors to clean and dry the door jambs with ammo spit spray wax this is one of the most overlooked areas that can build up dirt quickly so stay on top of it with every wash and remember use an old microfiber towel not suitable for the paint as these areas will be extremely dirty now with all the doors open step 11 is a quick vacuum okay so we just drive the car with hydrate and it looks absolutely spectacular then we opened up all the doors as you can see and we spray wax the door jambs and we clean them up because they get little gunky one thing to take note of always hit the bottom of the door because if you've missed the bottom of the door and then you go to close again all that water and gunk it goes back onto the the door jamb as you get in the car and every time you open you like oh man I totally forgot that or didn't I just wipe that but it's coming from down here so big heads up on that now with all the doors open see how I left them open I like to air everything out we're going to vacuum now this is like the what the Porsche of vacuums it is unbelievable too little expensive totally worth it and the big reason it's a Festool clean tech and totally worth it because there's a bunch of different settings so I can have high and low settings and there's actually an outlet out here but the big thing for me is they're dust extraction I'm willing to pay anything for dust extraction if you do this long enough especially if you're a pro you're going to get a lot of dust a lot of gunk and a lot of garbage in the air and I was sneezing a lot and you know runny nose that whole thing and this cut it out because there's a massive filtering or whatever but it's super thin I like this little hose but it's got a lot of suction so there's tons of videos of me playing with this thing so moving on to the vacuum I'm gonna pull the camera in and show you the steps it's very simple but it will save you a bunch of time alright onto the steps of vacuuming which by the way is kind of my favorite part of the carwash I don't know about you guys but I love vacuuming things out anyways let me tell you a little a little story a little trick here when you get a new customer for those guys who are professionals watching this when you get a new customer make sure I sometimes I do a little bit of a trick depending on if I can read their body language and see how fastidious they are how finicky they are I'll get in the car like this one's very small so like let's say a small person like my wife was in here I'd want to return the seats somewhere close to their length now if somebody was came in in the suburban and he was 6-8 I wouldn't want to put the seat like this it kind of ruins like he opens the doors I thought my gosh my car so clean wonderful and vacuumed out they get you tries to get in the car is like oh these guys sit here and play with it just be conscious of that that you don't want to you know totally mismatch that so sometimes I sit and I look in the mirror and I touch the steering wheel and I just make sure I okay this guy's really taller this lady really short or whatever so think about that anyways when you're doing your own car in the driveway put the seat back all the way and put the seat back lean that like as if you're going to go to sleep because you want to open up some of those crevices after that you're going to take your vacuum and you're going to go underneath the seat you're going to work your way from the center console this direction least that's the way that I do it and you get your crevice tool you know pretending the crevice - I can't turn this on obviously because we won't be able to talk take your crevice tool get all the way in the back and you can get next to the the rails as much as possible you want to wipe those rails clean either because there's grease in there so be careful get all the way through from here and then work your way clockwise around the the area here and before a few seconds ago I took the mat out as well put it on the ground we'll do that later make sure you don't throw it into a puddle the last thing is you are going to pull and I'll bring the camera in you're going to pull the seams open and vacuum out now we shot a couple of videos on that that'll get lots and lots of gunk that you didn't realize was in between the seat fold to see fold like this you're going to pull it open and then vacuum in between when you're done with that pull the seat all the way forward put the headrest the back all the way this way towards the steering wheel do the floor then do the back seat then do the trunk do the back seat to the floor do this you know so you're going to go in this sort of pattern just keeps it keeps your mind you can put your headphones on and not like what's the next step once you get that routine down it's kind of fun so yeah let's do that vacuum and then we'll talk about a quick wipe down and yeah we'll wrap up for step 12 add a few squirts of ammo lather to a clean dry microfiber towel and lightly remove any standing dust if you happen to find a new stain in the fabric use a moe shag fabric cleaner and my scrub pad to remove the drive material first soak the area with five to ten squirts then scrub the fabric heavily and dry with a microfiber towel remember time is of the essence with interior stains so stay on top of them quickly with every wash all right so we cleaned up the interior now we're moving on to the next step hang in there guys we're almost home or we're rounding third right now next thing you want to do is the glass there's a particular reason why we do it in this order now the next thing that we do I'll give you a bit of a preview we're going to work on the wheels again and put tire shine on the wheels and we're going to put a little bit of tire shine on the engine compartment - that's an option but the reason why we do glass first is if we did it after the tire shine obviously we'd have that residue on our hands and be touching the glass not a good idea to be smearing things around so we do glass first take a little bit of invisible glass I like to start with the driver's side because my towels are the cleanest fanon and maybe psychologically I think you know you want the driver's side window to be the cleanest of all the glass right so a few squirts nothing nothing too crazy take my glass cleaning towel now I have a bunch of videos you guys can go and watch what we just talked about glass cleaning ad nauseam tons and tons of things to talk about but low microfiber I'm going to do a quick say I did north-south north-south east-west east-west really quickly and then you take your microfiber towel which is dry and then I just lightly kind of like buffing it not this is the one time you're allowed to do circles what that's doing is picking up any of the last little residue that last little residue is what causes the streaks so if you pick it up real quick got no streaks go all the way around the glass and then you don't make sure your towels are clean and you can work the interior of the glass as well I'm going to show you how to do that right now okay so now you've done all the glass inside and outside except the windshield kind of annoying thing to do right you would normally come from this side you would think come from the driver's side but the steering wheels in the way so everyone has to come from this direction when you do you put the towel on your hand like this and then you flip your hand around that's the safest way to do it your left hand goes down here and your knee goes over here so you see how I can reach everything but most people think hey I'm just going to spray right here now I have a ton of videos you got you got to watch the video we did some really really long video on how to do this if I were to spray right now all the mist would go on the dashboard and sometimes dashboards get really really hot if the Sun was hitting it and it would evaporate very quickly and sometimes it caused dots I can't tell you which one will and which one won't but the safest thing to do is just not do at all so take a little bit you know you don't want to make these too wet so it's kind of a fine line put on your hand this and then you get in there and the same thing you go north south north south do one side of the time east-west and you want to push a little bit you can feel when it catches when it catches that means there's there's gunk on the glass so you really want to rotate these a lot then get in there quickly with the microfiber towel and you shouldn't have any streaks again pop out of the car and look inside get inside the car you know that kind of thing you're going to have to check believe me you are never going to get the glass right on the first try I don't think I've ever done it and 15 years of cleaning glass kind of pain the but just keep at it and you'll get it after the glass is done take an old microfiber towel and double check your rims in case you missed a spot and trust me I always miss a spot so spend 20 to 30 seconds now to avoid wiping the rim with your finger while you're refueling at the gas station as you can tell I have a lot of experience with this next add a few drops of ammo mud tire dressing to the rubber and massage it in be sure to go in multiple directions when applying it and allow at least 5 minutes to dry for special events I'll add tire dressing the night before in my garage to allow maximum penetration and dry time then I add a light fresh layer once I arrive at the show the last step is step 15 and that is to add a moment to the engine plastics and exterior trim if a light sheen is important to you afterwards lightly wipe the area to regulate the level of shine you see I prefer my dressings to be medium shine the bling-bling look is not for me well guys we're all set that's the chronological steps and some of the tools that I use when I do a basic Sunday wash let's call it that I didn't detail I didn't compound it and polish it didn't whack sit and do it and clay and do any of those things you can add them in when appropriate but I wanted to go over the steps in the tool specifically now the car looks pretty good but I wanted to show you something and leave you with something here are my two buckets right this was the bucket that we use to wash and fYI when you use these these mitts make sure you rinse them out and don't leave them in the water otherwise they get they disintegrate a little bit faster than they should so the heads up on that this was my rinse water now my wife's going to kill me this is a clean glass you guys didn't see this look at that murky nasty if you can see I'll bring the camera up close there's little bits of gunk and whatnot in there so I'll put that to the side and show you on camera and then on here I'm going to pour this out and I'll bring the camera in and show you how much gunk is on the bottom and how useful these great guards are so all that stuff came off this car and if I point the camera in here you'll see how how much stuff came up so hopefully you guys enjoyed this and learned a few things if you have any questions of course shoot me an email at Larry at my NYC comm basically everything that you've seen here is on my new website which I'm pretty stoked about so there's links and all that sort of stuff so as always I appreciate it very much and I'll see you guys soon

Channel: AMMO NYC

Views: 2,172,219

Rating: 4.8916812 out of 5

Keywords: Larry Kosilla, www.ammonyc.com, Drive Clean, AMMO Auto Care, How to detail your car, best detailing products, waxing your car, How to polish black paint, best interior detailing tricks, step by step car wash, how to wash your car properly, how to use a foam gun on your paint, AMMO Hydrate, how to wash your paint, Larry Kosilla washing a car, AMMO Mud, best carwash, top detailing tips, ammo car care products, ammo detailing, ammo detailing products, ammo products

Id: uWmtLSQYbys

Length: 25min 4sec (1504 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 23 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/roman_fyseek]

I'll bet his neighbors stare out the windows and exclaim, "Honey! Nerdboy is washing his damned car again!"

I know that my own neighbors give me grief about my cars and I only wash about once a week.

[u/FightOrFlight]

I see he's not using knee pads. I wonder if this is an old video before he blew out his knee.

[u/Nie9001]

Double grit guards is a really good idea! Think I am going to have to steal that.

[u/Willy_Wallace]

I'm really gonna have to invest in some new "old" micro-fiber towels.

[u/BassBona]

What is it that he sprays on the towels as he's drying??

[u/chicaneuk]

Thought this was a great video from Larry. I already follow some of these best practice steps when cleaning my car, but this would be an excellent tutorial for someone looking for an introduction on how to wash their car properly and safely.

Great work.

[u/CokeRobot]

I love this guy, he has a fucking filtration system for car washing.

That's a man after my heart right there.

[u/aznpersuazn615]

This is a great video that goes through all the steps of a weekly wash.

[u/Magllama]

15 steps! Question, I have a big wheel brush but it doesnt get the tight corners. I'm trying to not spend a lot. Can I just use a tooth brush or is that bad?