1 Ski Boot Ski Gear

If you exhibit your car at car shows, you will be familiar with the tension that exhibitors experience in the last 20 minutes before the judges are due to come around to look at your pride and joy. It is the same sort of stress that animal showers and would-be beauty queens feel when it comes to the final moments.

It does not matter how much effort you have put in during the preceding twenty-four hours, the last twenty minutes is invariably the worst. You absolutely do need to have detailed your car the day before the show, but here are some quick detailing tips to keep you occupied during those last couple of minutes when you are at car shows.

Glass: check all the windows and the paintwork around the bottom of the windows. Little boys love cars, especially beautiful cars and one of them might have pulled himself up on your car door’s ‘window ledge’ to have a better look inside. If he has dirty fingers, you have smudges.

Inspect your wing mirrors as well, because teenage girls will check their make-up in them and may even pull them off line.

Judges are impressed by gleaming glass, so keep one of those cloths for cleaning glasses in a plastic bag in your pocket so that you can take care of any last minute smudges in a tick.

The cleaning cloths that you can get from opticians are perfect for this work as they clean without smearing and dry almost immediately. They are fairly cheap as well.

Chrome: the shiny chrome bumpers are just the right height for kids to lay a hand on, so walk around your car with your optical cleaning cloth and just take care of any little finger prints. Likewise check the door handles and the boot lock, because they could all have had curious hands on them.

Tyres: you will naturally already have cleaned your wheels, tyres and wheel arches, but you may notice a nick in a tyre at the last moment. You could fill an old nail varnish bottle with black paint (and one with white paint, if you have white-wall tyres), then if you see a blemish at the last moment, you can paint over it using the tiny brush attached to the top of the nail varnish bottle.

Rubbish: check the region for rubbish like plastic and paper bags that could blow under your car. Of course, it is not technically your fault if someone has thrown their polystyrene hamburger box under your car or if a crisp packet gets blown against one of your wheels, but it still does not look good, so pick up any papers up wind of your car and check underneath for litter louts’ rubbish.

When you see the judges on the car next door, stop fussing and calm yourself down. Take a couple of deep breaths and prepare to be genial and helpful towards the judges.

They will almost certainly have a few questions about your handiwork and this is your time to bathe in the glory of all your hard work.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on lots of topics, but is at present involved with auto interior detailing. If you want some tips on detailing cars come over to our website now at Detailing Car Interiors.

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