Should I throw away towels used for ceramic installation?

[Sam Y]

I was reading an article here and it says the ceramic coated towels will damage your paint if you re-use them for detailing. Is this true? I installed my ceramic spray coat almost a month ago and now the towels I used are mixed somewhere in the bunch of towels that I have. Do I need to throw these all out just to be safe?

On that topic, is there any danger to re-using these towels as wipe-down rags in the kitchen? My fear is that the same towels I use to clean my wheels will have embedded contaminants that I probably don't want anywhere near my kitchen.

 

I am using the Costco Kirkland towels and I always wash them with microfiber towel wash on low heat setting.

[falcaineer]

That's a pretty great article, and I agree with what it says. I wouldn't risk reintroducing them to paint, save them for dirty jobs. Or toss them. Marking them somehow once done, like a black Sharpie in the corner or cut a corner or two off are a couple of ideas.

 

I can't vouch for safety in the kitchen, but once it is hardened, it's essentially glass so I wouldn't have a problem wiping things down with them. Except for fragile surfaces!

[The Guz]

Those towels are cheap enough to toss in the trash or relegate for dirty jobs.  

[Sam Y]

14 hours ago, falcaineer said:

That's a pretty great article, and I agree with what it says. I wouldn't risk reintroducing them to paint, save them for dirty jobs. Or toss them. Marking them somehow once done, like a black Sharpie in the corner or cut a corner or two off are a couple of ideas.

 

I can't vouch for safety in the kitchen, but once it is hardened, it's essentially glass so I wouldn't have a problem wiping things down with them. Except for fragile surfaces!

With the kitchen question I was thinking more along the lines of towels I had previously used to clean my wheels with.

 

I don't mind tossing the towels... it's more just the thought that I already used one that had ceramic coat remains it. I need a color system for these towels. Too bad Costco only makes one color.

 

Also, it says you're supposed to rip the tag off each towel before you use it? I did not know this!

[RayS]

I toss mine in my engine bay towel box.  I use those towels for anything that is exceptionally nasty.   Most of the time once a towel goes into into engine bay box, the water it will see is if I think it can be used again, I hit it with the hose.

 

Using the old towels for the engine bay, wheel wells, especially ones that have tar and such on them and even as grease rags.   The one place they do not get used again is on the body.

[Dan@Adams]

20 hours ago, Sam Y said:

With the kitchen question I was thinking more along the lines of towels I had previously used to clean my wheels with.

 

I don't mind tossing the towels... it's more just the thought that I already used one that had ceramic coat remains it. I need a color system for these towels. Too bad Costco only makes one color.

 

Also, it says you're supposed to rip the tag off each towel before you use it? I did not know this!

Yes, any kind of microfiber towel with a tag hanging from it is usually cheaper, usually manufactured in China rather than Korea, and you absolutely want to remove that tag, since it can scratch paint very easily. These types of towels could be used for engine bay, inside door jambs, exhaust tips, etc, but I would not recommend them on paint. On most coating jobs that I do now, I use our Suede Towel for the initial wipe and leveling of the coating, and then I follow up with an Edgeless Utility Towel to remove the remainder of the coating residue. Both of these towels are fairly affordable when purchased in bigger quantities during a sale, and it is peace of mind for me that I am not potentially scratching the surface when wiping away the coating with a lesser quality towel.

With our spray coatings (Ceramic Spray Coating and Graphene Ceramic Spray Coating), in my experience, the towels do not typically crystallize and harden in the same manner as the full Graphene Ceramic Coating, UV Ceramic Paint Coating, and UV Ceramic Wheel Coating, so I have been able to re-use towels that I use with the SPRAY coatings, as long as I soak them shortly after use in some Revitalizer and then machine wash them. I do wash them separate from my other microfiber towels to avoid any possible contamination.

Towels that I use with the full coatings do harden - I did an unplanned test a few years back with a white Single Soft Towel that I used during application of our older Ceramic Paint Coating Kit on my car. Two days later I accidentally grabbed this towel off of my work bench and put a few nice 4" faint scratches in the hood of my car when using it with Ceramic Boost, which I then had to re-polish out. Since then, once I use a towel for a coating, I mark it with a sharpie as @falcaineer mentioned, so that I know not to use it on paint again.