Video | Glass Cleaning

Glass Cleaning Steps:

1. Spray a liberal amount of glass cleaner onto a glass cleaning towel and wipe the glass top to bottom, being mindful of the corners (this step is to remove the majority of the dirt)
2. Spray a liberal amount of glass cleaner onto a new short nap microfiber towel and wipe the glass top to bottom knocking down any streaks
3. Inspect your work with a LED light
4. Wear gloves to ensure no oils get transferred onto glass
5. If the glass has extremely heavy dirt buildup or if the outside has mild water spotting, grab an AIO (All In One) polish like 3D speed. Lightly polish the glass using a microfiber applicator. (then start steps 1-3)

Tools:

1. The Rag Company Diamond Glass Towel
2. The Rag Company Edgeless 300 Towel
3. Sonax Glass Cleaner
4. 3D Speed
5. DI Microfiber Applicator Pad
6. Scangrip Sunmatch 3 Light
7. Protective Black Gloves

Videos:

Click: here for more glass cleaning videos

Transcription

00:00
Hey guys, it’s James here. We’re at the AutoNuvo shop in today. I wanted to go over glass cleaning. It’s, it’s one of those that we all kind of know how to do it. It, it for all of us. I think glass cleaning drives us all crazy and I just kind of wanted to go through a couple of troubleshooting methods that you can implement that’s going to hopefully, you know, not make you want to pull your hair out. So moving into that, we have right, we have short nap glass cleaning towels. We have longer nap towels in this case. This is one of The Rag Company’s multipurpose towels. Just a really nice general purpose towel. We have a microfiber applicator that I’ll kind of explain later, glass cleaner and so on and so forth. So in typical glass cleaning, right?

00:45
So we have a dirty window. We’ll take our short nap microfiber towel. We’ll take our glass cleaner, couple of squirts and I kind of, I think about it like this. My first couple of swipes here, like all right, I’m gonna get a one here and I’m going to obviously run the towel over the glass. My first couple of of swipes, I’m not worried at all about streaking. It can streak up like crazy. My goal in this initial kind of wipe down is to get as much of the residue off. So if it’s dirt, if it’s road film, if it’s fingerprints, or what have you. That is kind of my, that’s my goal, right? Is to get all of that kind of stuff off. Then we can now be concerned with streaks and minimum, I mean minimizing streaks, right? So then we can either go in with a secondary, obviously short nap microfiber towel.

01:38
And the funny thing is sometimes the glass dictates what microfiber towel works the best sometimes on some glass. Something with a little bit of a longer nap seems to remove the streaks better. In some cases it’s going to be that short nap. But the concept of it to take away from this is it’s always a two towel method, right? That first towel kind of knocks, removes the dirt. The second towel is all about streak removal and making sure it’s perfect. I think sometimes you know, another, and another thing to think about is obviously now right this section of the towel is dirty, right? If we just then kept using it. So we applied more glass cleaner and we went to the next. window. We just kept using this side of the towel on every glass panel. Eventually this side is, or the, yeah, this side is going to get loaded up with so much dirt and grime that it’s just going to be spreading it around to other parts of the car.

02:39
And that’s where you’re going to get streaks. So what I do is continually flip. Right now we’ve got a clean side, then I’m gonna go back into my glass cleaner application and I’m going to continue on. Same thing with this secondary secondary towel is I often switch this one up too because I sometimes write, I’ll be working kind of one of these little corners or an edge and inevitably a little bit of dirt gets on it. And I found that just over the years that, you know, kind of managing that dirt residue plays a big role at reducing streaks. So just something to think about. The, the another kind of trick that I’ve picked up over the years is and this can work two ways, right? It’s going work on the inside and it’s can work on the outside. So say you had a little bit of of water spotting that you wanted to remove from the glass.

03:28
If it’s heavy water spot, obviously you might have to grab a DA polisher and actually do some glass polishing. But if they’re, if it’s kind of only a minor situation, what you could do is you could grab like a microfiber applicator. You could grab like an all in one for example. For this example, it’s, you know, 3D Speed. And basically what you want to do is just have a little bit of polish, you know, right on the edge of the pad, you know, kind of sandwich it together a little bit to kind of spread the product out and just go in there with circular motions and remove a lot of that of that water spot if it’s relatively fresh. The other thing I can, I do with this exact same method is if the inside glass is really dirty, I mean really dirty and you’re blowing through towels like crazy.

04:13
I’ll do this process on the inside to basically cut the dirt almost and then once I’m done with this, I’ll come in here with a towel, remove this residue, and that’s kind of my initial glass cleaning method. And then boom, I’m following it right into the two towel method, the normal method. But it’s just, I find HD or 3D Speed to be a nice sport at really any all in one for that matter to be a nice tool to do some light glass cleaning, remove some water spotting if it’s there. It just kind of doing a little bit more of a deep clean than just obviously glass cleaner is going to provide. So just a couple of thoughts. I’m had been thinking about glass cleaning. It’s, you know, it’s, it’s one of those things that kind of drives us all crazy, but you know, we all have to get it to that, you know, to that perfect point.

05:00
I’ll leave you with this last, last tip is I use, gloves a lot. I mean just general detailing. I, I like to use gloves a lot, but with, when it comes to glass cleaning, if it’s hot or you live in an area where it’s hot all the time your hands will sweat, right? You’ll get sweaty and then that sweat is going to then transfer onto the towel and as you then move the towel, like you should be right. You know, going from side to side to side that sweat is going to get transferred onto the towel, creating kind of a streaky mess. So gloves definitely, definitely help kind of make everything easier. Reduce streaking and just kind of make the glass cleaning process that much better. Hope this helps, if you have any questions, comment below email us. We’d love to hear from you guys. Thanks for watching.