What are the best AND affordable detailing product's you use?

Do you have pictures of that nice shine?

Post your "process"!!

 

Have you tried a search? I know there is a post or two about people's detailing process around here.

 

Best and affordable? One word comes to mind - Meguiar's. But to expand on that, I recommend their professional line of products, not the consumer products usually found at auto parts stores, K-Mart, etc. Sometimes you can find a few of the pro line products at larger auto parts stores, but certainly not the full line. You can quickly spot the pro line stuff because they are packaged in tan bottles, not the burgundy consumer line bottles. Best results will be achieved using a machine like the Porter Cable 7424 Dual Action Polisher. It's much safer and easier to lean than a high speed rotary (which can pretty easily burn your paint if don't know what you're doing). Anyway, you can get all the pro line Meg's stuff either from Meg's website or at autodetailingsolutions.com (better prices actually) or check out your local body shop supply stores.

Here's a post I made on another forum I hang out at:


What are you looking to accomplish with the finish on your car? Is it badly swirled or does it just need a good cleaning? Are you doing all this by hand or do you have a dual action rotary machine?

My three "go to" products for paint care from the Meguiar's Professional line (you don't get this stuff at Target or WalMart) are #21 Synthetic Sealant (this is the last step, by the way), #80 Speed Glaze (a cleaner/polish that can be used by hand but, as with anything, a machine helps tremendously) and #83 Dual Action Cleaner Polish. #83 is much more aggressive than #80 so I don't use it much at all, mostly when doing friends cars. Keeping the car in good shape means you can usually accomplish everything you need with #80.

Just for giggles, here are some pix of some cars I've recently worked on using these products.

Neighbor's daughter's SAAB 9/3 convertible - bad swirls on the hood but the whole car was like this. I taped off a section of the hood and starting polishing. I needed the #83 because this was in pretty bad shape:



Trunk lid of the same car once everything was done. Now the whole car looks like this!




Here's a big ol' honking scratch on my neighbor's 2006 Chrysler 300. This took two passes of #83 and one of #80 to get rid of:



Scratch no more! This is after finishing the entire car and putting two thin coats of #21 on it.




Finally, a half & half shot of a friend's PT Cruiser hood showing before/after polishing. A hack painter "polished" this hood with a cheap rotary polisher and actually said the badly swirled and hologrammed finish was the final product. Jerk. If I recall this took a couple passes with #83 to eradicate, followed up with a pass of #80.




Bottom line is, once you get your technique down this stuff just plain works and you can correct some pretty horrible defects with it. Once the defects are gone the wax you use almost doesn't matter as the real shine comes from the polishing.