R34 GTR & S15 Silvia BATH | How I Wash Cars

So welcome back to another episode of Broken Sylvia where today we're going to be talking about car washing and specifically how I wash cars. Now there are a lot of different techniques tips and tricks that people give out but this is specific to how I do it so hopefully you learn something new and if you don't I still hope you enjoy the video. Before you get too excited with a pressure cleaner and wet the whole car I recommend you start off with the wheels and wheel arches first. This ensures that there's minimal amount of water sitting on top of your paintwork which means less chance of getting water marks. Spray the wheels down with some water to knock off the majority of the heavy dirt. These wheels have been ceramic coated in the past so most of the dirt will already end up on the floor. Following that I like to foam up the wheel and use various different brushes along with wash mitts to remove dirt from all areas of the wheel before finally rinsing off all the soap and dirt. Now that all the wheels are nice and clean it is time to move onto the body of the car. If your car is super filthy I mean caked on mud and dirt I recommend grabbing the pressure cleaner and just knocking some of the dirt down before foaming up the car. The foamed actual soap will loosen up most of the dirt so when you go to pressure clean it most of the dirt will end up on the ground and the car will be relatively clean and at this stage if the car was just dusty you'd be good to dry it but because it's got a little bit of dirt on the back we're still going to hand wash the whole car but most of the dirt as I mentioned will end up on the floor so when we go to hand wash it we won't risk scratching the paintwork as much. Now I'm going to get hated by the internet by the two bucket method. We're skipping the two bucket method today because firstly I can't manage to find a second bucket in Scott's shed and secondly like it doesn't need a two bucket wash it's it's not that dirty so we're just going to skip the two bucket method and stick to one bucket for the paintwork. This is the advantage of having a ceramic coating nothing really wants to stick as you can see the foam is actually kind of beating off the paintwork as well so when I go to pressure wash it off you'll almost see these stripes of dirt being washed off so the top part of the car as you'll see will start becoming cleaner and as we get to the bottom it'll be almost 100% clean. So once all the foam has been rinsed off the car the majority of the dirt will end up on the floor along with it. Now comes the time where you want to give it a light hand wash just to make sure that your paintwork is 100% clean so I recommend starting from the top down as the top will always have the least amount of dirt compared to the bottom of the car. Wash mitts and car washes. Wash mitts as long as it feels soft enough on your skin it'll be soft enough for your paint for example a wash mitt will feel nice and soft while a sponge will be quite rough and now comes the part of what car wash should I use. Now what I would recommend is use the car wash that will work with your ceramic coating so pretty much use the same brand of car wash as the paint protection you have applied to your car as manufacturers usually know what they're doing. So all righty so now that the car's been hand washed it is perfectly clean and it is time to dry the car. Now let's take a few steps back just so I can explain to you guys my way of thinking before the comment section gets super heated. So pretty much once you apply a ceramic coating to your paintwork things won't really want to stick to it so you bring in a dirty car you foam that car and you rinse the foam off. The foam loosens up the dirt which means once you rinse off the foam you rinse off 80 to 90 percent of the dirt along with it. So at that stage you already have a relatively clean surface to work with before you even make contact with the wash mitt. So now comes the hand washing stage and look I see so many videos about the two bucket method and two group guards and people thinking is if you don't have those two together that you're going to scratch your paintwork and stuff like that and personally I kind of agree with it. If your car is super dirty you got soft paintwork or a dark colored car or you just want to take an extra step in making sure you don't scratch that paintwork grab that second bucket and that's fine. As I mentioned at the start of the video I couldn't find a second bucket in Scott's shed to save my own life so we just had to work with what we had which was one bucket. So think about it this way you have a relatively clean surface once you've rinsed off the foam now you have water soap and a soft wash mitt in your bucket so when you go to make contact with your already relatively clean car how are you going to scratch that paintwork well reality you're not really like the chances aren't that high. Where the scratching happens is during the drying stage and trust me the last year and a half I've been air drying cars and Scott also has a very very beautiful maroon Range Rover which I've been maintaining for the last maybe 18 to 24 months and that car is pretty much perfect every time you pull it out in the sun after a wash. No matter how soft your chamois or your microfiber towel is you're going to scratch that car once you remove water with the towel you want to air dry it use an air blower a leaf blower an air compressor anything you have to air dry the car and that's the only way you are going to minimize the potential of scratching your paintwork and that is the only way so far that I've found that you can have a swirl free finish for longer than three washes. One car is done now it's time to get the S15 behind us dirty and give that a clean and see how that Avalon King coating holds up. The previous video I posted was on the basics of ceramic coating now hold up just a quick thumbnail so as I was saying we coated my friend's S15 Silvia in his garage we used a DIY ceramic coating made by Avalon King that they called the Armor Shield 9. Now unfortunately it's really nice the coating that was applied to the R34 GTR but I'm trying to do everything on this channel so people can relate to it and now it might be might be quite a bit of a cost to get a certified workshop to apply the ceramic coating that was used on the R34 GTR so let's use this video as a comparison of a professional grade coating applied versus a ceramic coating that you can do yourself at home for under $100. I couldn't find any spots everything was dry so this is like the best spot I could find to get the car a little bit dirty so yeah Danny if you're watching this apologies my friend. So as I mentioned before use the same brand of car wash as your paint protection that's applied to your vehicle. So there you have it people from the start to the finish now I didn't go in depth on how to clean door jams windows and dress the tires because I hope most people already know how to do that but the two main things I hope you guys have taken from this video is the number one is the foaming and number two would be the drying with the air blower instead of a microfiber towel or chamois. Now to be able to dry the paintwork with air you have to have some form of paint protection applied to the paintwork so the water can bead off the paint. You can probably tell by now that both cars have some form of ceramic coating applied to the paintwork the R34 GTR is a professional grade ceramic coating applied while the S15 has a DIY coating applied that we went through in the previous episode. So in the previous video I pretty much made the basics of ceramic coating how to apply it and what it does but unfortunately we didn't have time that day to get the car dirty and to see if it truly works or not so we had to leave it for this video and indeed that DIY coating does work. Now which one do I think is better well the obvious answer is the coating applied to the R34 GTR which is also seen in the video how well it beads up quite a bit better compared to the DIY ceramic coating made by Avalon King but in saying that the coating that was applied to the R34 GTR you cannot get your hands on so you have to get a certified workshop or a detailer to apply that coating. Now that can be pricey as I mentioned so for most people doing it at home on smaller budgets or just somebody that likes to detail cars and gets great satisfaction out of it I would highly highly recommend trying out the Avalon King Armor Shield 9 and in saying that I've put a link in the description if that is something that interests you. The next instructional detailing video I have planned is on my personal car which is a RB swapped S14 Silvia which I painted about two years ago and that car is pretty much just waiting for a good wet sand and paint correction so I think I'll make a two to three episode video on that because that is quite complex compared to washing your car and applying a ceramic coating. So now that we have the detailing side out of the way you guys can probably see that this isn't the normal location we are in a workshop or somebody else's workshop we are actually in Serbia as I mentioned in the previous video I was going on a bit of a holiday which is we're here now and I don't have many videos planned but what I do have planned while I'm here is a mega question and answer I'll pretty much answer anybody's question so either comment below or if you don't want your comment or your question to be seen just shoot me a message on Instagram I read all the comments I reply to everybody so yeah you know that your question is most likely going to get answered. Commonly asked questions are like what I do for work, how I get the cars, how old I am, where I'm from and stuff like that so yeah another video I made I hope you guys liked it if you like this sort of content consider subscribing and I'll see you guys soon.