Why Detail Spray
Is Our Best-Seller

Introduction

When you think of flagship products for a brand, Detail Spray is without a doubt one of our best-selling products ever at Adam’s Polishes. Odds are, if you’ve heard of Adam’s Polishes, you’ve tried our Detail Spray at some point. Whether receiving a small sample bottle in a goodie bag at a car show, a friend letting you borrow a bottle to try out, or maybe even Adam himself demonstrating its outstanding results on your car at a Cars & Coffee or detail clinic, almost everyone is familiar with “the pink stuff!”

 

Adam’s Detail Spray is one of our most fun products, having dozens of limited edition variations with unique label designs, bright colors, and amazing scents over the years. These limited edition bottles date back to 2015 - for holidays, collaborations with other companies, or different themes, and are sought out by collectors all over. Detail Spray is much more than just a quick detailer or a collector’s item, and you may not be aware of its other uses. In this blog, we’ll cover the top 5 uses for Detail Spray, and hopefully you’ll learn a new tip or two along the way!

 

 

Quick Detailer For Shows & Cruise-Ins

The number one use for Detail Spray is to add a super glossy shine to your ride, quickly and very easily. Use Detail Spray when you arrive at a cruise-in to give your car, truck, or bike that just-waxed fresh look, or to remove those annoying fingerprints or smudges from those that fail to follow the “Please look but don’t touch” unspoken rule of most cars shows. Detail Spray is great for carefully removing fresh bug splatter on your bumper, headlights, and hood, or to remove bird bombs before the acids and grit cause permanent damage to the clear coat. Just make sure to use a dedicated premium microfiber towel for bug guts and bird droppings, so that you aren’t wiping that contamination onto other areas of the paint and potentially creating scratches or other damage. Appropriate towel examples will be discussed below. Adam’s Detail Spray is great for using after a show, too, once your pride and joy is tucked away safely in the garage, if you need to remove a little light dust buildup from the drive home.

Everyone that tries Detail Spray for the first time is blown away by how it performs. Adam’s Detail Spray truly is a spray-and-wipe formula, with perfect streak-free results. Simply mist a spray or two onto a panel, quickly spread it evenly with one side of a plush microfiber towel, and then flip the towel over and wipe the area a second time for an outstanding shine and super slick feel. On show vehicles especially, where you may use a more traditional wax like Americana, Buttery Wax, or Patriot Wax, Detail Spray is the perfect maintenance product to extend the life and enhance the look of the wax in-between fresh applications of wax. While we do have maintenance sprays designed for ceramic coated surfaces, the polymers in our Detail Spray will not harm or impact your ceramic coating either, so it is safe to use on our Graphene Ceramic Coating™, UV Ceramic Paint Coating, and UV Ceramic Wheel Coating if you need a fast cleanup at an event. Adam’s Detail Spray is made for multiple surfaces - paint, glass, and chrome - though we don’t recommend using it on vinyl tops, tonneau covers, or interior surfaces like leather, plastic, or vinyl.

 

Towel Selection - Which Towel is Right for Your Vehicle?
The goal of Detail Spray is to wipe your vehicle down to give it extra gloss and depth, but you don’t want to cause any damage while doing this, so it is very important to select the correct premium microfiber towel for the job. Most cheaper, store-bought microfiber towels have tags sewn into them, as well as lower GSM (grams per square meter) ratings - meaning they are not as soft and can sometimes feel coarse or almost stick onto your fingers. Plus, they usually have melted rough edges from the manufacturing process. All three of these factors can cause significant scratching and damage to your vehicle’s paint, especially if it has a softer clear coat. All of our microfiber towels are premium towels sourced from Korea, with a 70/30 blend of polyester and polyamide, are tagless, and have either scratch-free satin borders or an edgeless, or borderless, design.

Our Single Soft Towel, Borderless Grey Towel, and Double Soft Towel are all excellent choices for use with Detail Spray as a quick detailer. The Single Soft Towel is a microfiber towel with a plush feel but not too thick. It’s rated at 480GSM, so it is delicate for soft paint, and excellent for wiping away Detail Spray residue without smearing or streaks. The white color makes it very easy to see how much dirt or dust builds up into a folded section of the towel before you need to flip to a new clean section. Our Borderless Grey Towel, also rated at 480GSM, has a similar feel to the Single Soft, but has a no-stitch borderless design. It’s the preferred towel of many of our show team detailers when wiping down auction vehicles at Barrett-Jackson auction events. Our third option for wipe-downs with Detail Spray is our Double Soft Towel. This is our softest, most plush towel that we offer, coming in at a very high 920GSM - it’s actually two towels sewn together with the scratch-free satin border, for the most delicate finishes.

Whichever towel you choose, make sure to fold the towel into fourths, and flip and fold the towel to a clean side often during use, so that you are not dragging dust and dirt particles onto other areas of the vehicle as you wipe it down. Quick, but long and straight sweeping wipes with your preferred microfiber towel will be the most effective way to remove all of the residue for a streak-free finish.

Drying Aid After Washing

The second most popular use for Detail Spray is to use it as a drying aid while drying off your vehicle after a wash. What do we mean by drying aid? If you’re not familiar with the term, a drying aid is a spray liquid that you lightly mist onto the wet surface after washing and rinsing the vehicle. The spray then incorporates into the water on the surface, helping to pull water droplets together by grabbing the minerals in the water. This then helps in minimizing the chance of water spots developing while drying the vehicle. Even if the Detail Spray begins to slightly dry on the surface, it will wipe away cleanly with your premium microfiber drying towel, leaving behind a nice, shiny finish. If you have not yet used Detail Spray as a drying aid, we think you’ll agree when we say that it’s a game changer!

The best scenario for drying your vehicle would be to dry it in the shade, or move it into your garage or under a carport and dry with the Adam’s Air Cannon, but these are not options for everyone. If you have our Portable Water Deionizer, minerals in your water and water spots should not be a problem either if rinsing and drying in the sun, but if you do not have a deionizer, using Detail Spray as a drying aid is the next best option to safely dry and significantly reduce the chance of water spots while drying. When misting the Detail Spray onto the wet surface, it weighs the water down some, and helps to pull the water for it to more easily roll off of surfaces. You do not need to use a large amount of Detail Spray - just enough to lightly mist all around the vehicle. Start by misting the areas in direct sunlight first, then move around to areas in the shade, so that there is even less chance of water spots from forming.

 

Drying Towel Options
Much like when using Detail Spray as a quick detailer, we have several different towel options for drying to fit your needs. The Detail Spray helps to evacuate the water and absorb into the towel more effectively, wiping perfectly clean and streak-free for an incredible look. Our Great White Drying Towel is essentially a much larger version of our Waterless Wash Towel. It is an absorbent microfiber towel, yet a thin enough material to still wring out easily after it has soaked up the maximum amount of water. The next towel up from it is our Ultra Plush Drying Towel, a favorite of many of our customers. The Ultra Plush Drying Towel is a much thicker material, and is dual-sided to both absorb significantly more water and provide a streak-free finish. One Ultra Plush can typically dry a midsize sedan without wringing it out. Adam’s Jumbo Plush Drying Towel is our most absorbent drying towel, holding over 9 pounds of water in the two-sided twist loop material. It’s capable of drying an entire truck with one towel. Lastly, our Hybrid Drying Towel is the newest drying towel design that we offer. It uses a unique thick pile and low pile alternating pattern to absorb water with even less chance of streaks on paint and glass. All four of these towel options pair perfectly with Detail Spray as a drying aid.

Priming Machine Compounding and Polishing Pads

A lesser-known but highly effective use of Detail Spray comes during the machine compounding and polishing stages of detailing a vehicle. Adam’s Detail Spray serves as an excellent primer for your machine pads. One quick and very light mist of Detail Spray onto the face of the pad will help to prime the pad with just enough moisture to reduce dust while compounding or polishing. If the pad has been used previously and cleaned, it will sometimes throw out a small amount of Compound or Polish dust even if you blow out the pads with compressed air first, so the light misting of Detail Spray directly into the pad face will reduce pad dust even further.

After you have compounded or polished a few 2-foot by 2-foot areas of the paint, there will be some compound/polish residue that gets built up into the pad. Detail Spray can also be used to essentially reactivate the correcting chemical that is already in the pad. One quick mist on the pad face again will allow you to compound/polish another 2-foot square area without having to re-add more drops of Compound or Polish back onto the pad. You can then alternate either adding more Compound/Polish or misting a spritz of Detail Spray as you correct each new section of the paint. Make sure not to oversaturate the machine compounding or polishing pad with too much Detail Spray though. If the pad becomes too wet, the Detail Spray could prevent the Compound or Polish from working to the best of its ability.

Pro Tip - Detail Spray as a Polish Removal Aid
There is one more bonus use of Detail Spray when Compounding or Polishing paint. Sometimes, if doing paint correction in less than ideal conditions such as high heat or outside in sunlight, the Compound and Polish can dry onto the vehicle surface very quickly and require much more effort to wipe off the residue from the surface. Misting a small amount of Detail Spray onto the surface or directly into your polish removal microfiber towel will allow the stubborn residue to wipe off with ease. This trick can also be used to remove wax residue that may have hazed on the surface for too long before wiping it off. Keep in mind though, that if you are polishing the surface to then apply a ceramic coating, you do not want to use Detail Spray after the polishing stage, since you need the surface completely bare before using Surface Prep and then applying the coating.

Clay Lubricant

Removing bonded contamination from your vehicle’s exterior surfaces is a critical step in the polishing process. Bonded contamination is exactly what the name sounds like - dirt, debris, over spray, industrial fallout, rail dust, brake dust, sap, bird droppings, water spots, and any other type of contaminants that become embedded into the clear coat of your vehicle and do not wash away with soap and water. The safest way to remove these types of contamination is by using a clay bar or clay mitt with a proper clay lubricating agent. The surface must be lubricated in order for the clay bar or clay mitt to glide across the surface and pull the contamination into the clay; otherwise the clay will drag, smear, marr the surface, and essentially, will not work.

Our Detail Spray is the safest and most effective clay lubricant that we offer. Detail Spray provides just the right amount of slickness to keep the clay moving and allows the clay to grab the contamination from the surface, while also reducing the chance of any light marring or haze from the abrasive clay. When using it as a clay lubricant, more Detail Spray on the surface is better than not enough. Spray some, then spray some more, and begin claying panel by panel. Since Detail Spray is safe for paint, glass, and chrome, you can and should clay those areas, all while knowing Detail Spray is providing the proper levels of lubrication to safely decontaminate your ride and leave it feeling super smooth.

 

Selecting the Right Clay
When it comes to selecting a clay bar to use on your vehicle, we have a few different options depending on the condition of the various surfaces on the vehicle. For severe contamination on a vehicle that has never been clayed, or a daily driver that has not been clayed in over a year, our Medium Grade Clay or Visco Clay would be our recommendation. For very light contamination removal, for example, on a ceramic or graphene ceramic coated vehicle, our Fine Grade Clay Bar is recommended. And for claying large surface areas quickly and more efficiently, the Clay Mitt is an excellent choice.

As mentioned above, make sure to use plenty of Detail Spray to keep the surface and clay lubricated. Typically you will end up using half of a 16oz bottle or more to clay a vehicle. Other chemicals like the soapy residue from Car Shampoo or diluted Rinseless Wash can be used as clay lubricants instead, but we still feel that Detail Spray provides the best performance in all of our testing. You may also need to follow up with compounding and polishing after performing a decontamination with clay, in order to remove any faint marring or light scratching from the claying process.

Cleanup Around The House

Our Detail Spray isn’t just for your vehicles - it’s great to use in many areas of day-to-day life around your house or apartment! Easily wipe away smudges and fingerprints on the exterior of your kitchen appliances with a mist or two of Detail Spray and a Borderless Grey Towel. Detail Spray works excellent on stainless steel or painted black or white appliances, and on your kitchen countertops - just note that if you prepare any food directly on the countertops, it would be better to use our Home Surface Cleaner on these areas instead. With the variety of limited edition scents that we offer throughout the year, it makes cleaning up around the house a little more fun and keeps everything smelling great. Our limited Pumpkin Spice Detail Spray is a customer favorite every Fall. It works the same as our regular pink Detail Spray and does an excellent job cleaning up the dining room table and chairs, entertainment stands, bookcases, glass doors and windows, bathroom mirrors, and more, with a refreshing pumpkin spice scent.

 

Electronics Screens - Tablets, Phones, and TV’s
If fingerprints on your tablet, phone, TV, or computer screen drive you crazy, then Detail Spray will give you some peace of mind. One light mist on your tablet or phone screen and then a few wipes with a microfiber towel will take care of fingerprints and grease no problem. You’ll notice the super smooth feel of the screen and that fingerprints won’t build up as easily afterward either. Detail Spray works well on glossy TV screens and entertainment screens inside of your car too. If your TV or nav screen is a matte finish, spray a little less and wipe with your towel more thoroughly to avoid any streaking, and it may add just a bit of a satin shine to the screen.

Summary

In this blog, we covered our #1 product, Detail Spray. We went over 5 common and not-so-common uses for it - as a quick detailer, a drying aid, a clay lubricant, a pad primer, and as cleanup around your home. If you are uncertain about any product or process, or have any questions in general, feel free to contact us at tips@adamspolishes.com, or reach us on our online communities on Adamsforums.com, Instagram and Facebook, as well. Be sure to include pictures of any scratches, stains, or other issues to help us find the best solution for you!