Nick T.
New member
Those of you that have been in the military may have learned how to “spit shineâ€� your boots. Since this can turn even rough leather into a mirror-like surface I thought that I’d give it a try on my black paint. Got a box of cotton balls, a cup of distilled water, a can of Souverän, and started on a one square foot test area. After about an hours work I broke out the obsession light and compared my test area to the multi-layered Zaino surrounding it. Just as reflective, but with a lot of added depth! Just to make sure, I added a single layer of wax to an adjacent area. Compared to the Zaino there was some increase in depth and a very little loss of reflectivity. Compared to the spit shined area the wax had far less depth.Acura_RL said:
This seemed great, but there was no way that I was going to even think about spending an hour per square foot to do the entire car! I’m obsessed, but not that much - - so it’s back to experimenting.
I tried several methods of mimicking the spit shine technique using Souverän, S100, P21S, and two types of Zymöl. I found that Zymöl didn’t work as well as the others which did work well, and that S100/P21S gave a slightly different appearance than Souverän.
The technique that worked best was to use a 4-5� square of MF as the applicator and a small bottle of distilled water for spritzing. Very little wax on the applicator - just enough to barely cover a two square foot area very thinly. Once that area has wax on it I don’t stop with the applicator, I continue wiping (just like applying with very light pressure, but no additional wax) until the wax has almost totally disappeared. This only takes maybe 15-20 seconds. Move the next area and do the same. After a couple of more areas, then I go back to the first area, wipe with a clean MF towel and repeat the application procedure. It seems to work best when only three layers are applied to each area in one day, but the next day I can apply another three layers successfully.
My opinion about what is happening (and this used to be a topic of discussion when part of my job was to keep my boots spit shinned) is that when you apply a very small amount of wax the amount of solvent involved isn’t enough to soften the underlying hardened wax and that the water must somehow help to “wash out� the solvents.
Kiwi shoe polish, which was unquestionably the best for shoes and boots, has a lot more solvents than good quality car wax and it certainly works well. When working with boots it was also found that if you applied a lot of layers when first starting there was a good chance that some of the wax might flake off where the leather flexed. It was by far better to only do a few layers the first few cycles. After a few cycles of this then it was okay to go to many more layers at one time. Even then there would be occasional flaking in some areas. On older boots that had a year or two of being spit shinned every couple of day the flakes would be quite thick!
For the past 3-4 weeks I’ve been working my way around my roadster working on one area (half hood, fender, quarter panel, etc.) at a time, stripping all sealants, dealing with any marring, adding 3-4 layers of a synthetic (Zaino, Platinum, Poorboy's EX, Klasse), and then topping with various combinations of P21S/S100 or Souverän. The jury’s still out on which synthetic and which combination of carnauba are the best for me on my Jet Black paint, but here are my initial observations.
The thin layers of carnauba add a lot of depth to the synthetics (except the Klasse which will get its first wax topping today) and little or no reflectivity is lost. The carnauba is much less susceptible to micro-marring than bare Zaino or Klasse. The surface hardness is about equal to bare Klasse, a little less that bare Zaino - as evidence by ease of bug removal. The carnauba hides underlying marring that the synthetics are unable to hide.
As always, YMMV!
