How To Clay Paint

[Mike Phillips]

How to Clay Paint

How to use detailing clay to remove above surface bonded contaminants

Here's our demo car, a 1981 Corvette that sits outside 7 days a week exposed to airborne contaminants.

[Mike Phillips]

Meguiar's Clay Bar Options

[Mike Phillips]

Interestingly enough, Meguiar's was one of the first companies, if not the THE first mainstream company to introduce the American car enthusiasts to detailing clay.

Here are some early clay bar's Meguiar's introduced between 1993 and 1996, not antique my any measure but already over 10 years old and at the time Meguiar's was way ahead of the curve as far as introducing enthusiasts to this new fangled thing called detailing clay.

I dug these out of my collection of old Meguiar's products as I was preparing to write a how-to article on claying.

How To Clay Paint

Here are the oldest examples of Meguiar's clay bar in my collection, if my memory serves me correctly, they introduced their first clay bar back in 1992 or 1993.
(If anyone has an un-opened Meguiar's Clay Bar Package, let me know )



Note this particular clay bar was black. I've never used it because it's part of my collection of antique Meguiar's products, and I only pried it out of the packaging for this photo shoot.




The clay is still soft and [i]very[/i pliable and the clay itself has the Meguiar's imprint in it. Interesting huh?

[Mike Phillips]

In about an hour I'm going to go pick up the Corvette for this how-to article, How To Clay Paint I'm working on today.

I've copied the above thread from it's original location in the Meguiar's How-To Articles forum to here in Detailing 101 so if anyone wants, they can add their requests for anything specific they want to see while we're washing, claying and polishing the paint on this car and I'll do my best to accommodate those requests...

[Mike Phillips]

Well here's the 2-door Plastic Fantastic in all it's glory!

[Murr1525]

Perhaps if you are working by hand, you could show what size area you work the polish on, before wiping off. I know it isnt supposed to dry, but seems like I get a little ambitious still, end end up with it being tough to get off once in a while.

[Mike Phillips]

Originally posted by Murr1525
Perhaps if you are working by hand, you could show what size area you work the polish on, before wiping off. I know it isnt supposed to dry, but seems like I get a little ambitious still, end end up with it being tough to get off once in a while.

Sure.

I'll show how large an area to work with a paint cleaner and a pure polish by hand.

[Chris Nemlich]

Mike-

If you use #80 or #83 on this car could you show a picture of what the polish looks like when it has been worked enough to take off?

Chris

[Mike Phillips]

It's about a half hour after 1:00pm pacific time and about 100 degrees outside with the sun high overhead. Meguiar's always recommends washing your car in the shade as the heat from the sun will tend to dry your soap solution before you can rinse it off.

The heat will also dry up your rinse water leaving water spots before you can wipe the car dry with a drying towel or chamois.



Because of the way my driveway is situated, there won't be any shade for the rest of the day, at least not enough to be useful. While trying to figure out how to wash the car out of direct sunlight and in the shade, I had an idea



I could clean out the garage and carefully wash the Corvette in our garage.

[Mike Phillips]

Originally posted by Chris Nemlich
Mike-

If you use #80 or #83 on this car could you show a picture of what the polish looks like when it has been worked enough to take off?

Chris

The paint job is what the owner calls a 3 hour paint job, he painted it himself in his garage. I mostly chose the car to show claying because this Corvette sits outside all the time, so I know it will show above surface bonded contaminants on the clay as we clay it.

For the detailing work, at this time I'm planning on using ColorX with the dual action polisher. Actually, my daughter and my son are going to do the work, I'm just the photographer today!

I will show different products or techniques like the one request, but only to show the request, I'm not going to apply ScratchX or a pure polish by hand to the entire finish as I don't think it will be that effective in this situation with this paint job.

[Mike Phillips]

Here are our tools for washing, in this case we are going to use the two bucket method so I can write an article about how to use the two bucket method.



We're also going to use Grit Guards in both our buckets to trap dirt particle at the bottom of the bucket and prevent us from re-introducing them to the finish.

Here's a unique feature a lot of people may not realize about our wide body brush, it's wide, but not so wide that you cannot place it inside a 5-gallon bucket without having to tilt it to one side.