Chemicals Used For Cleaning Cars

by Owen Jones⁽¹⁹⁰⁾ Red Star

http://the-real-way.com

Whether you are an amateur detailing your own car or a professional twelve cars a day, you should become well au fait with the chemicals used in the industry, because all chemicals are dangerous if misused.

However, safety is merely part of the reason for getting to understand the chemicals used for detailing cars, you also have to know if someone is attempting to sell you liquids that will or only cannot do the job.

There are a lot of liars in any line of business and a fool and his money are soon parted. Knowing the chemicals used for detailing cars will help you avoid being duped by suppliers.

For instance, you will often hear people say that you can wash the inside of a car using the liquid from merely one bottle.

This is simply not fact, particularly if you have various textiles inside the car like plastic door linings, cloth carpets and leather upholstery. It is just not feasible to detail all these different fabrics well with just one liquid.

Surfactants are clever kinds of soap-like substances and are made up of different ingredients, a bit like combined shampoo and conditioner for humans. These surfactant molecules consist of two kinds a hydrophile and a hydrophobe. The hydrophobe is drawn to dirt and it tries to break it down, while the hydrophile envelopes the dirt so that it can be taken away.

The most widespread solvent known to man is water, but it has only a limited effect on grease, so in the case of grease, manufacturers turn to butyl and dilemonene, which is extracted from lemon and orange peel. These solvents are expensive, but they are fairly harmless and can be used on several surfaces.

Other fats, such as sweat, can be washed away using animal fats that have been cured with a saponifier, which is normally a powerful alkaline. This does not sound very pleasant, but we have all used soap manufactured from animal fats.

The animal fat mixes with the human fat (say sweat) and they dissolve into one another. The alkaline then breaks them down so that they can get carried away. You do this each day when you bathe or take a shower.

The science of cleaning is quite a complicated one once you begin looking into it, but why certain products are only good for one type of job only becomes evident once you do study it.

However, when you do find out what is really going on and where the chemicals have come from, a great deal of people wish that they had not taken the time to go into the topic.

In summary, and to keep it simple (more for my benefit than for yours, I assure you) endeavour to treat like with like. Be wary of using a chemical for other than its specified job without having conducted trials on out-of-sight patches. Endeavour to use petroleum based cleaners on oil; alkaline cleaners on organic materials and acids on non-organic substances.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on many subjects, but is at present concerned with auto interior detailing. If you want some tips on detailing cars go over to our site now at Detailing Car Interiors.

Article submitted Friday, April 29, 2011 & read 174 times.

Owen Jones writes on many subjects and is currently running several websites. He was born in Wales but now lives in northern, rural Thailand.

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» left by David Tanguay (1 year 20 days ago.)

Thanks for the tips Owen
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» left by Owen Jones⁽¹⁹⁰⁾ (253 days 9 hours ago.)

My pleasure, I don't know how to get around the labour part of it though :-)
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