First things first... wash the car...
In my how-to book and in real life, I always start by washing the wheels and tires first and the reason why is explained in the book.
My personal choice for a tire dressing is the TUFF SHINE Tire Clearcoat because it leaves a natural, non-shiny, non-glossy finish which is dry to the touch. As long as you don't curb your tires or wash the tires with either a strong wheel and tire cleaner or any type of APC you also won't remove the clearcoat finish. In fact just normal car soap will clean your tires and the BIG plus is your wash mitt won't turn all black with an oily slime like most tire dressing will cause to your wash mitts.
Some kind of slimy tire dressing already on the tires...
Machine Clean Tires
The key is to get the tires surgically clean. The previous owner used some type of greasy, slimy dressing so to REALLY get the tires clean then in my opinion the best, easiest and fastest way to remove all the slimy tire dressing is by MACHINE!
Cyclo Brush on a Griot's DA Polisher = Best Machine Tire Scrubber
These tires have a lot of very thin or fine lines raised lines in the sidewall so to get into these areas and agitate the tire dressing I'm use a
Gray, Ultra Soft Upholstery Brush made for Cyclo Polishers on a Griot's Garage DA Polisher on about the 5.0 Speed Setting with the
TUFF SHINE Tire Cleaner.
Decontaminate Wheels
Since I've only owned this car for 5 days I have know idea what's been done for maintenance in the past so after machine scrubbing the tires the next thing I'm going to do is decontaminate the wheels using
Iron X and a
Daytona Speedmaster Wheel Brush, to get behind the spokes, the back of the wheel barrels and around the brake calipers. I used an
8" Montana Boar's Hair Wheel Brush to clean the face of the wheels.
Removing Iron Particles out of Mercedes-Benz Ceramiclear Paints
Following the steps outlined in my how-to book, the next thing to do is decontaminate the paint. For this I'm using
Auto Finesse Iron Out Iron Remover.
Bleeding-Effect in Mercedes-Benz Ceramiclear Paint
Light Iron Contamination
These pictures show the paint was in fact lightly contaminated with some type of iron particles...
The BIG PICTURE
Yeah yeah yeah... I know, everyone loves seeing the
bleeding-effect when using an Iron Remover because it
looks cool. Kind of like how everyone loves seeing water bead-up after it rains on a freshly waxed car.
But here's the deal... while you do want to remove iron particles out of your car's clear coat finish for a number of reasons, in the big picture, this is a process you want to do, (to make sure any iron particles are removed), but in reality... you really don't want to see the bleeding-effect as this means your car's paint was in fact contaminated.
Iron contaminated paint indicates corrosion and deterioration of the clear coat has been taking place and because clear coat paints are THIN this is a bad thing. This is especially true for Ceramiclear paints because the very top layer or shell of a Ceramiclear paint is only around .2 mils for the nano particles of Fumed Silica which provide the scratch resistant characteristics that everyone loves about this type of paint.
Ceramiclear Paints - Be Careful
Here's an excerpt from the above article.
Mike Phillips said:
From Dr. Ghodoussi...
After the "cerami"clear top coat is sprayed, the nano particles of Fumed Silica (SiO2), which are synthetically engineered, migrate to the top 0.2 mils of the clear coat as it is curing.
If you remove this potion of the clear layer of paint, the paint under it will be much softer and will not polish out or react the same way the nano particle portion did or would.
You will at some level have compromised the the finish on the car.
For the same reason you don't want to find iron contamination in a Ceramiclear paint job you also don't want to use aggressive compounds or polishes as they can remove too much of this top shell of fumed silica and expose the underlying softer paint resin.
The fact is...
It would be much better for the health and longevity of your car's paint to
NOT see the bleeding-effect as this means your car's paint was
not contaminated.
Make sense?
But yeah.... it looks cool even if like the paint on my MB the paint is only
lightly contaminated with iron particles.
