- Yo, your car is way dirtier than you think.
Your interior is probably harboring more germs
than a public toilet seat. (toilet flushing)
And the dirt in your engine bay
could be disguising hidden leaks.
The bird poop on the outside of your car
could actually honestly be destroying your paint.
But today, that's what we're gonna fix.
I'm gonna show you the best way to deep-clean your interior,
including how to make sure you really sanitize those germs,
and how not to mess up any of the materials in there.
Then we'll clean the engine bay and I'll go over
how to hose things down properly without frying any
of your important electronics.
And finally, I'll show you the right way to wash, clay bar,
and wax your car to keep your paint,
or what's left of it, shining for as long as possible.
Let's go, baby!
It's gonna be a satisfying day.
We're gonna clean this turd up.
(lightning crashing)
- Okay, so we're pretty much all new-found
germophobes these days, right?
Well, listen to this.
If the average American spends over 290 hours in
their car every year,
that's seven 40-hour work weeks in your car.
Every time you get in and out, you're dragging germs in
from the frightening outside, like the gas station.
Gas pumps, for example, are over 11,000 times dirtier
than a public toilet. (toilet flushing)
One of the most effective ways
to disinfect against coronavirus,
which is what we're all dealing with right now,
is isopropyl alcohol 70% or stronger.
So if you wanna sanitize your car after you go
to the grocery store or what-have-you,
a little bit of isopropyl,
wipe down the things you touch, like your E-brake,
like your shifter.
So I'll kind of do one of these and wipe down the excess.
So a little isopropyl alcohol, that'll disinfect your car.
I think that's a smart thing to do with everything
that's going on right now.
But we're gonna go way beyond that.
We're gonna detail this thing.
This thing's gonna be clean by the end of the day.
We're not just disinfecting.
And we're gonna start with the interior.
And the first thing we're gonna do with the interior is
sweep it out.
To do that, I'm actually gonna remove the seats.
It might seem a little weird, but it's really easy to do,
and it'll give us a lot of extra room to sweep,
and we're gonna scrub the carpets,
so let's yank them things out.
It was five bolts.
Center console is like, four screws, I think,
and then it's out.
Might as well.
Totally worth it.
So much cleaning can be done now.
All right, so now we're ready to vacuum this thing out.
Use whatever you got.
If you've got a shop-vac, sweet.
Your mom's vacuum, cool.
Whatever sucks the hardest, use that,
and it'll do what you want it to do.
It's very simple.
We're just vacuuming out a car.
(vacuum whirring)
All right, we've got this thing vacuumed out.
All the loose dirt and debris is gone,
so we're gonna scrub the carpets,
and for that I'm using this.
It's turtle wax.
I've had good results with it in the past,
but you can use any carpet cleaner you want.
If you get your carpets too wet in the car,
you can end up soaking like,
the foam padding behind the carpet,
and if you do that then you're gonna get some mildew
and mold and your car is gonna smell terrible,
so don't go overboard.
Just go just the right amount of board.
(brush scrubbing)
Now, what's nice about this stuff is that it's also good
for use on the entire interior,
so you don't have to be too careful when you're spraying.
(brush scrubbing)
We got all the carpets scrubbed and now we're gonna do
the rest of the interior.
Basically you're wiping down and cleaning all the plastics.
I'm gonna keep using this stuff.
It's been working pretty well.
And you can use soapy water or a number
of other interior cleaning products.
For us, this seems to be doing fine.
Look how gross these old seat belts are.
It looks like they're mildewy.
I think they've been wet. (brush scrubbing)
Details matter.
Take a look at my, what is this, my headlights?
The switch is all gunked up and grimy,
so to clean that out and make it look kind of new again,
I'm gonna use the old toothbrush.
(foam squelching)
Just like that, too much.
But now every time I go to flick on them headlights
or hit a turn signal,
I'm gonna remember this moment.
All right, we got the interior all scrubbed down.
Everything is clean.
Now it's time for some dressing
and I'm not talking about ranch.
I'm talking about something that you put on all
of your vinyl, rubbers, and plastic.
All these black bits that start to fade,
you can put some dressing on them and bring them back
to a like-new finish.
Once we're done dressing, we'll put the seats back in,
and then we're gonna move onto the engine bay,
which is so dirty.
(gentle music)
Journey of 1,000 steps starts with one mile.
All right, your engine bay.
You might not really care about keeping your engine bay
that clean but having a clean engine bay can make it way
easier to spot leaks and thus, diagnose problems.
So the first step to cleaning your engine bay without
damaging any electronic parts is
to disconnect your battery completely.
That way, if you do get water in a spot
where you don't want it, there's no electricity.
All you got to do is let it dry out.
All right, we're ready to clean the engine bay,
but before we just go hosing stuff down and scrubbing,
we just need to check all of our fluid caps like our
dipstick and our engine oil cover and our brake fluid
to make sure they're tight so that no water gets in,
because we're gonna use some water in here.
Then I think I'm gonna remove the intake just
to get a little bit more room.
We're gonna clean the underside of the hood,
and while we do that, it's a nice idea to do this to try
to protect some of these electronics.
Now, that said, everything in here is designed to be able
to get wet.
I mean, when you drive in the rain, this stuff gets wet,
but some of this stuff is a little bit sensitive,
so just to play it safe, we'll put the bag down.
All right, now that we've got the engine all covered,
we're gonna spray some de-greaser on all of the dirty parts
in the engine bay, then I'm gonna scrub it,
and then I'll rinse it off.
So to do that, you can use just the old garden hose.
It'll do a fine job.
But to expedite things a little bit,
I like to use this pressure washer.
I got it at Harbor Freight.
I think it was about $80,
and it's not a very good pressure washer,
but it's great for doing car stuff
because it's not too powerful.
You do need to be careful when you're using
a pressure washer.
You don't want to go spraying any electrical components
directly or anything like that, but if you use your brain,
it can be a great tool, so I'm gonna use it.
(washer whirring)
You know, this is really simple stuff.
It's just spray some de-greaser, scrub it down,
rinse it off.
Do that a few times and she's looking beautiful.
All right, now the perimeter is pretty much cleaned up,
so it's time to take the bag off the engine
and clean that thing.
It's a dirty engine.
Boy, it's grimy.
(smacks lips) (deeply inhales)
Well, I guess we better get started.
Well, we're gonna spray some de-greaser onto the engine bit
by bit and we're gonna scrub it and then we're
gonna rinse it.
There's nothing more to it than that.
All right, now that we've got a clean engine,
it looks so much better than before.
I'm honestly pretty impressed with how well this thing
cleaned up but now it's time to put on them finishing
touches because that's what really matters.
We gotta dress it up.
Let's make them plastics like new again!
It looks so much better.
I'm almost surprised with how well it cleaned up.
(percussive music)
Now the exterior.
A lot of people think having a dirty car is just annoying.
It's just dirty, so what?
Who cares?
Well, leaving dirty or other weird substances like sap
from trees or bird poop from these (beep) parrots,
that can actually harm your paint.
There are a few spots on the Miata that it looks like a bird
pooped and it was left for so long the paint
actually lifted off.
Now, washing a car is pretty simple,
but you can do it wrong.
Yeah, I'm not kidding.
There's a correct order to do it in and each step
has a correct way to do it.
Have you been doing it wrong?
Let's find out.
Well, we're gonna start with the wheels and tires.
To do that, we're just gonna use the same wash
that we're gonna use for the whole car because our wheels
and tires are pretty clean.
They're only like, three weeks old.
Just soap, baby.
Soap and a little water.
(gentle music) (washer whirring)
One done, three to go!
So here we've got our soap hopper for our pressure washer.
You put soap in here and then it sprays out
foamy, soapy water.
You can get one that just goes on the end of your hose.
Those work all right too, but you can also just rinse it
and get right into it.
So we're gonna cover the whole car with foamy, soapy water.
That'll help lift the dirt and help carry some of it away
before we even touch it.
We're getting ready to wash the car.
For that, I have two buckets.
We're gonna do the two-bucket method.
It's pretty simple.
One bucket is just a rinse bucket for after you've got a
dirty mitt, you rinse it,
and then the other is your clean soap and water.
That's important, but another thing that's important
is your sponge.
There are a few different types.
What's right?
Now, starting with the worst are these.
These cost like, 50 cents, and basically what happens
when you wash with these, the dirt pretty much stays
on the surface.
So if you've got a dirty car and you're washing with this,
you end up just rubbing a bunch of dirt into your paint,
so I wouldn't use those for anything but wheels
or your engine bay.
Then you've got these.
This is like a terry cotton, and these are okay.
They're pretty cheap, but they do at least hold
the dirt a little bit deeper.
So these are okay, these are usable.
But this is what I like to use.
This is microfiber.
You've got a bunch of little microfiber dreadlocks,
and these are really good at trapping dirty away
from the surface of the mitt.
So we're gonna get our two-bucket method going.
We're gonna put soap and water in one,
clean water in the other and I'll see you at the car.
Oh, that's fun.
That's satisfying.
Come check out my top.
All right, so we're scrubbing the car,
but it's not as easy as that.
You need to think about what order you're doing things in.
So the easiest way to remember is to go from top to bottom,
and the reason we do that is because the bottom of the car
is where things generally get the dirtiest.
So you want to wash the clean parts for the sake
of your mitt and work your way downwards.
So we're gonna do the top.
The hood, the roof and the trunk,
all the upward-facing panels first.
(mitt scrubbing)
Now that we've got a fresh pad, into the soap,
back to the hood.
(washer whirring)
All right, we've got the top all washed and rinsed,
so now we're gonna do the second layer,
which is gonna be the whole way around the car
from the moldings up, so like,
the top halves of the doors and the fenders and the bumpers.
Come on. (washer whirring)
All right, we're getting ready to do the third layer.
That's gonna be the lower layer.
All of the moldings, all the real dirty part
from the moldings down, all the way around.
Let's get it.
(washer whirring)
Done!
Not really.
We gotta clay bar it still.
So yeah, we just washed the car and we washed
it pretty good but there's still a bunch of stuff stuck in
the paint all over.
It still looks pretty bad,
so that's why we're gonna clay bar it.
All of this pollen and sap and junk that's embedded in
the paint, the clay bar (clicks) knock it right out.
It's just gonna take a little elbow grease.
Let's get her back in the garage.
All right, so before we clay bar, I'm gonna dry the parts
of the car that we don't need to clay bar,
like the roof and the glass, just so they don't get
spots on them.
You can go with a big fat microfiber like this,
pulls the water away from the car as well as the dirt,
which we talked about earlier.
And it's nice.
On a car like the Miata it only takes one.
All right, so we've got our clay bar and the clay bar came
with some spray.
This is lubricant that you can spray on the paint,
and then you rub the clay.
It's really simple.
It's just a matter of doing the whole car.
It just takes a long time.
And you don't want to use too much pressure here,
just a nice, light pressure.
You feel it smoothing up the more passes you make.
So it's just this times the whole car.
So it's not fun, but it's not hard.
Now that we're done with the clay bar,
we're getting ready to wax the car.
We've got a paste wax and we've got an applicator.
Get a little bit of wax on the applicator
and come down here.
It doesn't take much pressure.
It's not like you're trying to scrub or paint correct
with the wax.
We're just trying to get a nice, even application,
and it's just this for a while.
You do that pretty much to the whole car,
and then you buff it off.
And you'll be left with a protected paint
that also looks really good.
When you're doing this kind of stuff,
you're gonna be working close to plastic trim,
but you should wipe it off immediately with a damp rag,
because if you let it dry, it can stain it,
and it's really hard to get out,
so just wipe it off.
Okay, so our wax is applied, it's dried up,
and it's ready to buff off.
This is pretty easy.
You just do one of these with a clean microfiber
and admire your work.
Well, we've got the wax all buffed off.
It's great, looks great, feels great.
There's just a couple steps left.
First I'm gonna hit the outside of the car
with that dressing we were using earlier for all our rubbers
and plastics and our tires.
And then we're gonna clean the windows,
and that's it.
(gentle music)
(deeply exhales)
Well, the sun has set and the car is clean.
That's it, baby.
There's only one step left.
That's to step back and admire your work.
It still looks like sh.
It's shiny.
You might think that this is a clean car
from like 20 feet away,
and that's really what we were going for.
There's no fixing this paint just by washing the car.
I'm not insane.
It does look a lot better though.
And all it took was a few hours of work
and some pretty simple products.
So I hope you guys spend some time in the garage
cleaning your stuff.
And the really good news is that since we're not driving
that much, this thing's gonna stay clean for a long time.
So I hope you get out there and put to use
what we talked about today and I also hope
that you subscribe to the channel and hit the notification
bell so you can stay up to date on what we're releasing,
because I'm telling you we're releasing stuff
every single day.
So, please.
In the meantime, follow me on Instagram
to see more of what's going on with the Miata.
Follow Donut Media @DonutMedia across all social media.
We'll see you guys next week.