Keeping a protective coat of wax on your paint is the best way to maintain its shine and prevent environmental damage from marring the finish. Between waxes, you can use any number of bottled detailers on the market, like Meguiar's Quik Detailer, Mothers Showtime, or Eagle One Wet Wipe & Shine, to remove fingerprints, light layers of dust, tree sap, bird droppings and other contaminants. None of these should be used in place of a wash, though.
So, is that "all about" car care? Hardly. We could go on for days (and it sort of feels like we already have). But this information is a great place to get started. And as Mothers' Craig Burnett says, "It's OK to experiment. Don't be afraid to find a care product that works for your car and your paint."
If you've ever used touch-up paint to fill in stone chips, you know the paint brush, no matter how small, can leave little blobs of paint on your hood or fenders. Mothers has developed the Paint Chip Repair kit that will remove those blobs while leaving the paint in the chip. Here's how it works:
1. After using rubbing alcohol to clean the area around the chips, dab on the touch-up paint as sparingly as possible. You'll still get blobs, but minimize them as best you can at this point.
2. The repair kit comes with a credit card-sized piece of plastic that you wrap with a scrap of old T-shirt or similar soft cloth.
3. Apply some of the paint chip repair fluid directly to the touch-up paint if you're working on a horizontal surface like a hood. For a vertical surface, put a dab of the fluid on the cloth-wrapped card and then wipe it over the paint.
4. The fluid will soften the paint, so after a few minutes' time a gentle rub with the card will remove excess paint over and around the chip while leaving the chip full of paint. Here you can see the excess paint on the cloth.