Our Cleaning & Detailing Process
Anything we do during the detail process goes through this first.
Whether it’s cleaning the interior surfaces like your seats and door panels, or whether it’s the exterior of your car like your paint, wheels, or engine bay, there’s a primary methodology we follow:
Start with the least aggressive method first and go from there.
We’re not the only ones that use this method.
Any professional detailer will follow this same process.
What does that mean?
As an analogy, think about it like when you get a small cut on your leg.
Is the first thought in your mind, “Call an ambulance, I need to go to the hospital and get surgery on my leg!”
No, of course not.
Your first thought is just to clean the small cut and put a band-aid over it
Within a few hours the minimal pain is gone and within a couple of days you’ll be back to normal.
It’s the same concept we apply in detailing.
If we’re going to remove a scratch from your, we’re not going to pull out the big guns on the very first try.
That’ll most likely be overkill.
We’ll start off the least aggressive method which might be a cleaner and a towel.
Did it come off? Does it look better? Do we need to continue?
If we think we can get better results, we’ll move onto the next step. If that doesn’t work, we step it up again in aggressiveness.
This ensures that we only use the least aggressive method every time it comes to working on your car.
This help protect the integrity of the fabric and surfaces.
"What happens if you start with the most aggressive method?"
For one, you end up doing way more work than necessary to get the job done.
Going back to the hospital example, imagine we just need to put a band-aid and we end up performing surgery.
Second, it doesn’t allow you to see the true condition.
If we’re cleaning an interior to get a stain out of the carpet and we immediately jump to the big machines and cleaners, it’s most likely going to come out.
However, if we’d start with something a lot more simple like a towel and cleaner and the stain comes out, then we know how tough the stain actually was.
Honestly, it’s the same end result for the customer. A clean car. But it is crucial for us as the professional detailers to truly understand the level of cleaning we have to go through.
That way we can offer the most genuine results to you, the customer.
We don’t want to go out and service a customer and tell them it’s going to take 3 hours to complete the job, when in reality, if we started with the least aggressive method to get the job done, it can actually take 1 hour.
You’ll see this all the time with auto mechanics.
They always start with the most basic and simple solution to the problem.
If your headlight bulb no longer works, they don’t immediately start checking all the wiring. They’ll first start with the light bulb and make sure it works.
So when you hire us to clean your vehicle, you’ll know that the cleaning process we choose is the option to get the best results without sacrificing the quality of the job or your vehicle.
"We just had our car detailed but it looks bad"
That’s why we get called out a lot to work on vehicles that were recently “detailed”.
A customer will want their car waxed but then they’ll end up with a negatively noticeable difference in their paint then what they originally had.
That’s because the “detailers” used a rotary machine to apply the wax, they used the improper tools and methods, they went way too aggressive, and now the paint doesn’t look as nice.
Customers will ask us:
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“I have a scratch, can you get that out?”
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“There’s a stain on my seat. Can you get it out?”
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“My engine is dirty. Are you able to clean it out?”
Since we need to go through our checklist of least aggressive, we hardly ever say, “Yes we can.”
Because maybe we can’t.
Maybe of the four methods we can use to remove a scratch, the fourth method only take out 60% of the scratch.
As you can tell, this wasn’t about telling you the exact tools and products that we use. It’s all going to depend on the size, condition, and results we’re going.
However, all that is dictated by the process of starting with the least aggressive method first and working from there.