Hello everyone. I am just setting up an account so I can post some questions I have about the products and what I should be using for my truck. Although I am getting up in the years with my age, I am about as new as can be to this car care. I have always been one to just save the money and not have anything that really needed any special wash, waxes, polishes, or much less detail sprays, correcting compounds, sealants, long throw random orbital buffers, etc... About the only thing that I have had that got washed and waxed is my Harley Davidson. Of course there is not a lot of paint being that the only painted service is a gas tank and two fenders. Most of the polishing on this is chrome. As for my cars, well they have never been any newer than 12 years old and who cares what they looked like. I mean I got them from an auction before they were scrapped.
Flip forward to today when my wife finished school with a medical degree, I finished my second degree, and our family is now a two income family and things seem to have changed. Now I have a metallic blue 2016 Chevrolet Silverado and my wife has a new Land Rover Discovery. Now we have something that I want to keep nice.
When I purchased my truck I got the paint protection, I think it was Commodore or something like that. I know it is likely just a gimmic that the dealer makes money on and the product doesn't actually work for anything. I didn't purchase it for the way they say it works, I purchased it because it gave me a warranty on the paint. I didn't buy anything like this for the Discovery as it is a little less at risk of being scratched and is garage kept.
I decided that I would take my truck through a car wash real fast since so many people told me how good it was and they have had no problems. I believe this was my first mistake as my truck came out scratched, and I mean scratched. It looked like someone took a wire brush down both sides of the truck. Of course, as we all know, it wasn't the fault of the car wash. There is no way a machine spinning in a circular motion spinning brush like pieces down the side of a vehicle would cause millions of little 3 inch horizontal scratches down it. It must have been a weedeater or something. Okay, I digress.
The car wash owner looked at the truck and said there was nothing in the car wash that would cause this. Understand that the owner was very nice and really did try and help. During the conversation the owner told me that it is possible that it was the after market paint protection that the dealer sold me coming off. He offered to buff part of a fender to see if he could get the scratches off. He pulled out his orbital buffer and Adams products that he said he uses on his corvette that he shows. In about 10 minutes, the scratches were gone and the fender was shining like it should. I then went home and got the after market paint care product kit from the dealer and put the paint protection renewer on the truck and the scratches appeared to be gone. Probably not gone, but not really noticeable. I fear the next time I wash the truck the scratches, or swipes of paint protectant coming off, will just appear again.
I am impressed on how the products seemed to work on the fender the car wash owner did. I don't want to waist a bunch of money on Adams products that I don't need due to my lack of experience, especially since the cheapo paint protector renew stuff from the dealer seemed to mask the scratches. I would rather spend the money on the correct Adams product the first time.
Sorry for the length of the post, but there is the story of how I got here any why I am in search of the correct product to use.