We all know that paintwork should be perfectly clean of all contaminants before waxing, and clay bars are now often used for this,or liquids such as T-cut.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of each method,both are tedious and time consuming.

I wondered if there was a better way.

Professional car painters clean down car paintwork before applying paint with special solvent cleaners to remove dirt,grease,etc which otherwise might stop the new paint adhering properly to the old.There are various brand names,the one I know best is called "Panel Wipe".

It seems to me that to wipe over the paint work to clean it prior to wax with this product would be a lot easier than the methods above.

What do you think?

If it were that easy, everyone would be doing it. There's no shortcuts or substitutes for time and effort unfortunately, although there are some tools, techniques and chemicals that can help you out a bit. You need to understand that all the things you've mentioned above (wax, clay t-cut etc) serve totally different purposes and don't need to be done all the time (by the way, you shouldn't really use T-Cut for general stuff because it's too abrasive and will make a complete mess of your paint).

There's no harm in using a degreaser chemical such as pre-paint or panel wipe (only when starting afresh however, if you are just topping up an existing layer of wax then pre-paint will strip all the existing layer off!), but you still need to use a clay bar every so often to remove bonded contaminants that such chemical treatments can't shift (probably only once or twice a year at most though), then you will need to polish to remove scratches and swirls.

Of course you can just seal or wax a car straight after a good straight-forward wash, you still get the protection of the wax but the finish is not going to be as good (wax doesn't really add much shine, it's more for protection. Most of the shine comes from the smoothness of the underlying paint, which is what polishing achieves).

For example, I clay the car around once a year and I'll polish it properly two/three times a year, but I'll top up the wax or sealant every few months. Essentially once the car is washed you decide for yourself how happy you are with the finish and on that basis you can decide how much stuff you want to do.

The reason professional car painters can get away with just using something like "panel wipe" is because they sand the paint down first, so that removes the contaminants, and fresh paint is obviously scratch free.

Edited 26 August, 201213 yr by ckyliu