A few readers asked “How do you use a microfiber towel to remove polish or wax residue?”, so here’s a basic but thorough explanation of what I like to do for best results.
I apologize ahead of time for some blurry/bad photos. I noticed a few were out of focus and others were incorrectly exposed, so it’s not the greatest photography :). The car in the photos is, as you can see by the paint, in very poor shape and awaiting a thorough correction in the near future.
The towels I use in this example are sized 16″x24″, so they’re fairly large and I’m able to fold them as shown below. For smaller towels, such as the DI Microfiber Autofiber Zero Edge Towel, I simply fold them twice in order to have a square section small enough to use easily.
I start with the towel completely unfolded, so it’s currently 16″x24″ as it sits.
I fold the towel once…
then twice…
and finally a third time.
This way, counting both sides of the towel, I have a total of 16 sections that I use to wipe off wax or polish residue. I use 2 of these 16 sections on the towel to wipe off 1 polished area on the paint. So typically I can wipe off about 8 polished areas with a single towel. For example, this is an average area size I use for paint polishing…
To remove the residue, I’ll grab the towel after folding it and place the 1st section on the paint…
Then I wipe in one direction with that side of the towel…
After that, I flip the folded towel over so the 2nd of the 16 total sides on the towel faces down…
and then wipe in the other direction to ensure complete removal of the residue.
When done with that area, I move on to the next. In these photos, I’ve obviously polished the same area for the article, but in an actual detail I would be moving along to another section of the hood. In any case, once done wiping the old area and polishing the new area, I take the towel as is from the last section…
unfold it once to expose 2 new, clean sections on the towel…
then flip it over to place those clean sections onto the paint…
and finally fold it once so it’s easier to hold and I am back to more residue removal…
I have found this to be the best method as it allows me to fully utilize any microfiber towel, while properly and thoroughly removing any residue from the paint.
As you can imagine, I keep flipping through these sections until I have used up the entire towel, at which point I simply move on to a new towel. I stick to the above method to ensure residue is completely gone, however I can typically do even more removal with the 2 sections described above. That said, I probably go through a few more towels than necessary, but at the end of the day I really don’t see a difference between washing 20 or 24 towels :).
As with anything in the realm of detailing, there are variables that will affect the process, so sometimes I’ll find myself removing all residue with 1 or 2 sections as shown above, while other times I may have to use 3-4 sections. This usually happens when I start taking off wax from an area too large for only 2 sections to remove.
Well that about covers it. It’s a simple explanation of how I use microfiber towels to wipe down any residue from paint during a detail job.
Hope it helps and, as always, thanks to all for reading!