No luck claying! Tried 2 different clay bars now + 2 different QDs!

[JJH]

Both times that I have tried claying my Acura NBP TL type-S, I have had no luck at all. At first I thought it was the Meguiar's clay bar kit but now I'm not so sure. I replaced the Meguiar's kit with a Uber blue fine grade clay bar and ONR diluted to clay lube lubricity per the directions on the bottle.


Today, in about 60 degree farenheit weather, I washed my car with Dawn dish soap via two bucket method and dried with waffle weave micro fiber drying towel. After the car was completely dry, I attempted to clay the car with the Uber blue clay bar and ONR clay lube. No luck. The clay bar just slides across the paint and doesn't pick up any contaminants. I made sure the dilution ratio was correct and that my car was in fact contaminated by doing the sandwich baggy method. I can hear tons of noise and feel all kinds of stuff in the paint.


The best way to describe my problem is that the clay doesn't have any friction whatsoever against the paint. It's not dirty after I clay. It slides similar to the way a wet bar of soap would slide against the bottom of a bath tub.


*What am I doing wrong? Is it possible that I have received two defective clay bars?

[ChevyNick]

If you were to polish and wax over an area, would it be smooth and quiet? For some reason I think that your paint may be noisy and rough just because its not coated with anything after that dawn soap. I'm interested to see what other people have to say .

[Murr1525]

Re: No luck claying! Tried 2 different clay bars now + 2 different QDs!

Hard to have a defective clay... Either the paint is naturaly rough, or there is something very stubborn on the paint.

You could try a more agressive clay, but then you risk putting some swirls into the paint.

[ffboy]

Re: No luck claying! Tried 2 different clay bars now + 2 different QDs!

It "could" be the after effects of dawn. It may have left the paint removed of whatever coating it may have had, removing whatever surface tension the paint had and affected how the clay lube behaves on the paint's surface.

[ffboy]

Re: No luck claying! Tried 2 different clay bars now + 2 different QDs!

Not surface tension, but just removed whatever coating the paint may have had and affected the way the clay lube behaves on the dawned surface and therefore affected the clay itself

[Michael Stoops]

Re: No luck claying! Tried 2 different clay bars now + 2 different QDs!

Are you seeing anything at all on your clay? It sounds as though you may have some extremely stubborn contaminants that a very mild clay like our consumer clay or this "Uber blue fine grade clay bar" just can't deal with. Even so, with our white consumer clay you should at least be seeing something on it, even if you're only removing 5% of what's there. If so, we'd recommend stepping up to a more aggressive clay and skipping the mild stuff. Our C2000 Blue Mild Professional Clay, despite the "Mild" moniker, is a good deal more aggressive than our consumer white clay and we've seen plenty of situations where it cleared things up very quickly when the consumer version couldn't.

[Markus Kleis]

Re: No luck claying! Tried 2 different clay bars now + 2 different QDs!

Also, how much pressure are you using when claying? If the contaminants are stubborn it can require some serious effort to remove, especially with consumer grade bars.