When someone is getting into detailing or they’re trying to start their own car detailing business, the main thing they will do is look online at all the types products and tools that are out on the market.
They’ll want to buy the latest-and-greatest products so they can get the absolute best results for their car (or clients car’s)
They’ll buy a specific leather cleaner, specific cloth cleaner, specific wheel cleaner, specific tire cleaner, specific plastic cleaner, and so on and so forth.
You see it all from the different manufactures that they have created a “brand-new” product for a “brand-new” application.
In this article, I’m going to discuss what I personally use to do 80% of my cleaning and why you should do the same, too.
What Is An All-Purpose-Cleaner?
If the name doesn’t give it away, I’ll put it simple: it cleans a lot of different things.
If you’ve ever walked through the auto detailing section at your local autoparts store, you’ll see that they have an engine degreaser, a leather cleaner, a cloth cleaner, a wheel cleaner, and a tire cleaner.
You’ll buy five different products to detail your car. For me, all I’d have to use it my all-purpose-cleaner (or APC for short) and it can handle all those tasks for me.
Instead of using five different products to clean my car, I can simply use one product and I will get the same amount of work completed.
You Can Dilute APCs
One of the better reasons of using APC is that you can dilute it to your liking. For example, if you’re going to clean a reallllyyy dirty engine that has dry oil and muck with a bunch of dust and dirty everywhere, you can use an APC diluted at 4:1 for a strong cleaning.
On the other hand, if the engine is cleaned on a regular basis and it only has a light layer of dust, you can easily dilute the APC to 10:1 for a mildly-strong cleaner.
Whether the area is really dirty or really clean, you can easily and quickly dilute the APC to fit your needs. And if you’re going to be detailing on a regular basis, you can buy gallon sizes of APC that will last you a good amount of time as opposed to buying a 16oz bottle every time you need to clean your wheels from the local autoparts store.
What I Personally Use APC For
Since I’m a professional detailer and detail a lot of cars per week, I’ll have a two pre-set APC ready to go every single day. Those will be an APC diluted 10:1 and 4:1. With those two options, I’ll be able to tackle on 80% of all details that come my way.
As far as what I actually detail, here is a full list on what I’ll use them on:
- Leather seats (unless they’re vintage or have no protective coating)
- Cloth seats
- Floor mats
- Rubber mats
- Door panels
- Dashboard
- Plastic
- Engine
- Wheels
- Tires
- Fender wells
- Rubber
As you can see, an APC cleaner has MANY applications since that’s the whole point of an APC…. It can clean almost everything!