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Tricks to Remove Sticky Gunk How to Wash Your Car Repair Scratches

Created on: 2020-08-29

This video gives some tips to removing sticky stuff from your car without scrubbing, which can damage the paint.

Huh, not me, I didn't do that. You'll never catch me using a sponge on a car when I wash it or try to get some sort of pitch off, or the scouring pad. Believe it or not, the front part of a sponge is just as bad as a scouring pad when it comes to washing a car, and we're gonna show you why.

So, apparently someone at home thought they'd wash their car, and this is the end result. They reached in the garage, got the bucket, got the car soap, grabbed a sponge. That's a no-no. Sponges keep dirt in the pores part of it, and then they ran across some pine pitch, and they thought, "I'll get that off," and they put some force on it. And this, as you can see, is the horrible result. They scratched the clear coat in several places, trying to get pine pitch off. We're gonna talk about home remedies and how you can get pine pitch off without damaging the coat of your car.

So if you look it up, you'll find several home remedies for getting rid of pine pitch or even hardened tar, something on your car. Because you don't wanna harm the clear coat, so you never wanna scrape or put force behind it. So let's put that to the test. Let's try the hand sanitizer, peanut butter, smooth, crunchy, whatever you like. Well, we've got enough spots on this car that we can test them all with you. So let's do it. I'm gonna start with this hand sanitizer.

So supposedly, like, the alcohol in it will loosen up the pitch or anything that's on the car, and I'm just gonna use my finger and see if I can loosen that right up. Now, personally, I think that the hand sanitizer has ammonia in it, and that's not helping the clear coat either. And me scrubbing it, even lightly with my finger is not gonna help it. But I can tell you dry with a sponge really damaged it. So let's see if... I can still see it's there. Wow. I'm gonna say that even made it worse. Now we're gonna try the smooth peanut butter. Now, this I believe, because the oils in it, natural oils from the peanut butter, the peanuts, should lift up anything. Now, I've done this for on the carpet at home with gum, instead of using ice. I've done this with pine pitch, with cars, but this particular car has already been tried. I don't know if it's done its damage. Huh. It's working. It took that piece that was there, right up.

Now I'm gonna take a wet paper towel and see if I can rub this off. Let's see where we're at. Well, I'll be. Look at that. The raised part of it is gone. It's just got a line on it. The raised part like that is gone. So if I keep working at that with peanut butter, that should hopefully take that, lift that right up. So, we know the smooth peanut butter worked. Typically, it's gonna be the oils in it. Well now, I have a chunky one. Yeah, you're gonna say, "No, don't put those peanuts on that." But you know what? The damage is done, so let's see if the chunky peanut butter, that some people write in and say, works better. It's probably still basically just the oils, maybe the chunk of the peanut butter will do its scraping instead of my finger. Well, what do you know? I think that one's already gone. Look at that.

So now that we've filled our bucket up with the soap, I'm gonna add the actual wash mitt, and I'm gonna soak it. I don't wanna do this dry. So I'm gonna submerge it right in that water, get all those little fiber fingers nice and wet. While that's soaking, now I can rinse my car down. So another key note is when you wash your car, do not do it in the sun. Shaded area, evening, when the sun's going down, or garage, if you're lucky enough to have one, do it on the inside of the garage. That way, no elements, no sun, no wind, no sand is blowing onto it while you wash it.

So with the hose, I'm also gonna spray in the fender well, and get rid of that road dirt. So here's a little quick automotive bonus. When you are washing your car, take your hose, and you wanna rinse inside the grille real close, because on the other side of that is the AC condenser and the radiator. And when you take those little fins, I know you've seen them, road dirt gets stuck in there, leaves, litter, all that stuff clogs it in, and that causes your AC to run hotter, so therefore it's not efficient. And it can actually damage the actual AC compressor, because it runs hot and overheats. So take your hose with pressure. If you live on a dirt road, try to do this once a week. If not, average once a month in the summer and the winter, to keep that road salt out, and dirt. Just go right in the grille and make sure that goes right through the fin.

So now, if you're vertically challenged like me, you need a little step stool. Now I'm gonna get to the roof of the car. Now, I've got my mitt and soap. The key here is, see that weight? Look at how it's weighted down from the water. Just let that do its job. Don't scrub it like it's a pot and pan from spaghetti night. Just, back and forth motion. Don't ever do the wax on, wax off model. That's just for Hollywood. That puts swirls in the clear coat and it'll do long-term damage. So, just give it a nice back-and-forth motion. Now I'm gonna go to the other side, do the roof, before I rinse it. Now I'm gonna rinse the soap off. Now I'm gonna dry the car. I like to use a squeegee. Sometimes I use a chamois, the old rawhide style. They also have a new style that is, like, a fiber cloth, but it's got a coating to it, and it's got little X's in it. That works awesome, too.

Start from the top and work my way down. So, I'm gonna continue and try to get rid of these scratches from the sponge, from the lovely car wash someone did. So I'm gonna use microfiber, and it says use a little dab on a microfiber cloth, and to work it in in a back-and-forth light motion for 30 seconds. So I applied a little dab on the microfiber cloth and I'm just gonna go back and forth. That's about 30 seconds right there. I can see the color being lifted. So I'm sure it does some overall micro-managing of the paint molecules. We're gonna let that dry with a nice hue to it and then we'll take a clean microfiber cloth and buff it. Look at that. You can almost barely see some of the scratches there. It's not gonna take care of everything, but what a difference.

So hopefully this video helps you out washing your car. Can be a fun chore, not if you do damage. But look what we did. We got it right out of there, a little elbow grease and a nice product from 1A Auto. So, if you like this video, subscribe, ring that bell, turn on all your notifications so you don't miss any more of this.

Thanks for watching. Visit 1aauto.com for quality auto parts shipped to your door, the place for DIY auto repair. And if you enjoyed this video, please click the subscribe button.


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