Quick Detailing Suggestions For Car Shows

If you show 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 inspect your pride and joy. It is the same sort of stress that animal breeders and would-be beauty queens feel when it comes to the final moments.

It does not matter how much work you have put in during the previous twenty-four hours, the last twenty minutes is always 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 busy during those last couple of minutes when you are at car shows.

Glass: check all the windows and the paintwork at the bottom of the windows. Little boys love cars, particularly beautiful cars and one of them may have pulled himself up on your car door's 'window ledge' to have a better look inside. If he has sticky fingers, you have smudges.

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

Judges are impressed by sparkling 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 ideal for this work as they clean without smearing and driy almost immediately. They are quite cheap as well.

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

Tyres: you will naturally already have washed your wheels, tyres and wheel arches, but you might 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 mark 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 area for rubbish like plastic and paper bags that could blow under your car. Naturally, it is not technically your fault if someone has thrown their polystyrene take-away box under your car or if a crisp packet gets blown against one of your wheels, but it still does not look nice, so pick up any papers up wind of your car and check underneath for litter louts' rubbish.

As soon as you see the judges on the car next door, quit fussing and calm yourself down. Take a couple of deep breaths and get ready to be genial and helpful towards the judges.

They will probably have a couple of 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 article, writes on many subjects, but is at present involved with auto interior detailing. If you want some tips on detailing cars go over to our website now at Detailing Car Interiors.