Exterior Car Care Guide

Your auto technician in Fort Collins will take very good care of your maintenance and repair needs when it comes to your vehicle. This includes any mechanical issues, body damage, and quality routine care like an oil change or battery check.

One item you, as the car owner, can easily address yourself, is exterior car care. A clean car will experience less corrosion, as salts, toxins, and dirt will eat away not only at paint finishes, but exposed metal as well.

This is especially true during our fall and winter months. Every time we drive, your undercarriage is getting attacked with grit, rocks, ice, and other debris. Your car’s lovely dark teal paint job can look more like murky brown mud after just one excursion through town after a heavy snow, or when snow is melting and mud is jumping onto everything. If, like most of us, you drive on the major highways, and take trips to resort towns or Denver for various winter adventures, your car will be coated with everything one can think of. Sometimes, just sitting in a parking space will get a car filthy. Why? Snowplows. Not only will snowplows pile up beds around your parked car, but passing drivers will be splashing mud and slush onto your cars exterior.

Winter is a very dirty time for cars, no getting around it.

Your auto technician in Fort Collins won’t, were sorry to say, wash your car for you. Its up to us to maintain our car exteriors ourselves, apart from damage.

When it comes to washing our cars, Winter can be a very difficult time to pull out our garden hoses, cleaning cloths and buckets and clean our own vehicles in our own driveways. It’s simply just too ridiculously cold. Not only that, but its icy. Any water hitting the ground will just freeze into more ice, both on our cars and on the ground, creating more of a hazard.

During more seasonal months, go ahead and wash away in your driveway, but during the winter, find a good car wash. Your car service in Fort Collins might have one as part of their business. If they do, go ahead and use it. Many different kinds of car washes are available, depending on what best suits your needs. If its above freezing, you can always go to a conventional car wash where you hose the vehicle yourself. Be absolutely sure to not only clean the windshields and body parts, but the undercarriage as well. Most road salt and debris will be lodged up under your wheel wells and other areas beneath the car. All those various road hitchhikers can really wreak havoc with time. Salts, used to de-ice roads will eat right into the metal of your car. Debris lodged around wheel wells will damage your tires. And other items, like plain old dirt and mud are not good for your undercarriage.

What about waxing? Waxing is something that helps protect a car’s paint job, but it doesn’t need to be done very often, if you do it yourself it can be quite time intensive. A good rule of thumb for car waxing is two to four times a year. Feel free to ask your car technician in Fort Collins about all the various exterior cleaning and maintenance products available for your car. She can best advise you on which items are really beneficial, which you will most benefit from using, and give you a timetable for things like waxing your car. The key though, is just consistency. Once you have decided which exterior cleaning and polishing routines are best for your car, do them on a regular basis, just like you have car maintenance done on a schedule.

Now we have some auto technician tips tips on dealing with more difficult exterior cleaning jobs.

Bugs. Be sure and get that green, yellow and red goo off of your windshield. It is often sticky, and spraying it with a hose probably won’t remove the “splat.” A simple flat edged razor blade will remove the insect remains off of your windshield.

Bumper Stickers. Winter is not the ideal time to get these sticky disasters off of your car, but it can be done. To remove a bumper sticker, an application of heat will soften the glue adhesive holding it in place. A hair dryer will work, just be careful of electric shocks. Once the adhesive glue is softened, start peeling. The bumper sticker will probably come off in strips. Simply reheat it, and keep peeling. If you can wait for summer, we advise you to do so. A hot sunny day will do the “heat” work, and it will be far more pleasant to sit outside peeling off a bumper sticker when its not so cold.

For any other exterior care questions, be sure and ask your auto technician in Fort Collins for advice and recommendations. It is harder to keep our vehicles cleaning the winter, but well worth it.