Car detailing in Earlwood

‘Full detail’ is not a standard. One operator means a wash and a vacuum, another means a day’s work, and the price gap between them is not a rip-off on one side, it is a different job. Here is the job we mean.

Exterior. Pre-rinse and foam to lift loose grit before anything touches the paint. Contact wash with clean media and two buckets. Chemical decontamination for embedded iron fallout and tar, which is the orange bleeding you see on light-coloured cars and which no wash removes. Then a clay stage for whatever is still bonded to the clear coat.

Wheels and arches. Faces, barrels and the inside of the arches, done with their own brushes, mitts and buckets. Brake dust is abrasive and it stays on the wheel side of the job.

Interior. Vacuum everything, including under the seats and along the rails. Hot water extraction for carpets and cloth seats, steam for vents, switches and the tight spots a cloth cannot reach, and leather cleaned then conditioned with a product matched to its pH.

Finish. Glass, trim and shuts, then protection: a sealant, or a step up to a coating.

Interiors carry more of the day-to-day than paint does, and they are where a car most obviously feels its age. Scuffed plastics, gloss where hands land, carpets that never recovered from one spill.

The work is in the seams, rails and vents, not the surfaces you can see, which is why a proper interior takes most of a day. Hot water extraction lifts staining out of the pile instead of moving it around, and it is the stage that separates a detail from a vacuum.

Odour almost always has a source: a spill that reached the carpet underlay, a damp cabin filter, or microbial growth in the air conditioning. We find it and treat it. Spraying scent over a smell does nothing.

Almost every car carries swirl marks, the fine circular scratches in the clear coat that scatter light and make paint look flat and grey. They are worst on dark colours and they come from washing.

Correction removes them by machine polishing a microscopic amount of clear coat until the surface is level again. Not filled, not hidden. That is why it changes the colour so dramatically: light finally has a level surface to reflect off.

Clear coat is finite, so the right approach is the least aggressive one that achieves the result. We take depth readings and run test sections first.

Dog hair weaves into carpet and cloth seats and a vacuum alone will not shift it. It takes rubber brushes, compressed air and patience, and it adds real time to an interior, which is why we ask when you book.

The hair is the visible part. Dander and the oils off a wet dog get into the fabric and are what the car actually smells of. Extraction deals with that where a vacuum only deals with the hair.

If the dog rides in the boot, say so. The boot carpet and the plastic trim around it usually need the same treatment as the cabin, and a rubber boot liner afterwards makes the next clean a five minute job.

Most of the cars we detail get driven every day, parked on the street or in a work car park, and washed when someone remembers. That is the honest starting point and it should shape what you spend.

For that car, the priorities are the decontamination, a good interior and durable protection. A three-stage polish on a daily driver is money into a finish that the next six months of car parks will chip away at.

If the car is a keeper or a weekend car, the sums change and a deeper correction with a coating pays back. Say which it is when you call and the recommendation will be pitched at the right car.