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Tips & Tactics

DIY - Taking Care of your Car

Have you wash your car, send it for service recently? How often you do it? How much you love your car more than your girlfriend/wife?
Taking care of your car is important in many aspect. Much of it will benefit you in near future. Let we first see how the process goes.
It is take you more than guts to take care of your beloved car. Some people would wax it everyday, and keep the detailing intact. Some will go even further by applying special coating such as Teflon coating, so that it could last forever. So how about you?

Here are some tips for you to keep you car in care:
Exterior parts:

• Wash your car body at least once a week, not everyday! This is because the chemical contained in the shampoo could damage your paint, make it look dull.

• You need to select a good shampoo, or at least the best is to use a dishwasher detergent or shampoo, that gentle to your skin, so it would be nice to you car.

• After you wash it thoroughly, never keep it dry itself! Take a clean dry cloth, wipe it and wait for a few minutes, so the surface will dry evenly.

• The best time to wash your car is at 8am in the morning. During this time, the sun is not too hot, and you will not sweating to your feet.

• For the under carriage parts, spend some time to send it to a local car wash, and ask them to clean it for you. but if you want to do it yourself, you could buy a mini waterjet to clean up the dirt under your car.

• Your tyre also need a shine. Clean it and shine it with the appropiate substance. But, do not shine your tyre too often. It could eat up your tyre surface, so it could make your car look older.

• If you want to clean the winscreen, just pour some cold water, and add some shampoo and wash it so that all the dirt and dead bugs wiped away. after that, apply some rain coat solution onto the windscreen. This rain coat can protect your screen for up to 1 to 2 month once your apply it. It create a layer of water repellant skin that repell the rain drops so you can drive safer.

Interior parts:

• The interior should be cleaned periodically so it match your car. you may say that who give a damn about clean car? You wrong. It could identify you as what you are.

• For your dashboard, use a vinyl cleaner. It is in foam form, so just squeeze a little and apply it to your dashboard. I will dry itself, hen just wipe with mild cloth.

• If you had wood panel in your car, you can use any cleaning agent since it is coated.

• For your upholstery, you can use carpet cleaning solution, but you need a good ambient to do this if you have rubber part, such as your floor mat, clean it as usual, and keep it fully dry before you put back into your car.

• This is the most important part, your car seat. Leather sea have special solution to polish it back to have it original look. Problem with imitation leather, they don’t act like leather. Most of them were made from PVC, so you need to use PVC cleaner, then apply a layer of tyre polish. Wait until it is fully dried if don’ want your cloth to have marks.

• For fabric seat, nothing much you can do, but to removw the fabric and cleaned it by washing machine, otherwise jut buy a new fabric or imitation leather to replace it.

Engine Bay:

• If you have a new car, care is simple. But if you are riding a 10 years or older autos, you need a waterjet or high pressure aerosol container, use some diesel or high chemical solution, so you can clean your engine bay easily. Just cover your starter/distributor, caburetor and any opened inlet so water doesn’t easily penetrate your engine, otherwise water will clog you system.