Two box cleaning questions
 

1) What do you all think of using regular dish soap to clean the box? (Dawn, palmolive, etc). Will this be effective? Anything wrong with this approach?

2) Who here has stuck some adhesive-velcro pads to the dash to hold things on it? How bad/hard is it to get the crud off and can this damange your interior?

I believe PerfectLap hasn't answered because he read this and had a stroke.

1) Dish Soap!!! Unless thats the first step in a multi step detail process you should stay away. How does a new paint job sound? Yeah not so good when you see the bill.

1) Why would you do that?

The Boxster is no Neon, Corolla, Metro...etc.

@ Grizz

HAHAHAHAh thats when you know its bad. When PL doesn't respond to a cleaning question.

LOL!!

Dishsoap generally will strip any "wax" off your paint leaving the top coat exposed to the elements.

I used to use dish soap for washing my cars, and felt that the horror expressed by the car cleaning products people over this practice was a lot of self-serving BS. My cynical side still tends to look with a good deal of suspicion at a lot their claims, but I no longer think this is one of them.
I have had several cars washed only with dish soap and I can say without exception the paint looked like crap after about seven or eight years. Dull, and almost impossible to bring back with cleaning and waxing. At the time I put it down to just age and sitting outside, but experience with car washing soaps has convinced me that a good deal of the problem was probably the dish soap.

Please do youself a favor and buy a bottle of car shampoo from Finish Kare.
It is no more expensive than a gallon of dish soap and 100% better for your finish!

Dont use a brillo pad if that was going to be your next question!

that will strip all the protection off the car, including wax and polish that was ever done, and will leave your car prone to just about anything, if you keep that up you will notice quite fast some discoloration and fading of paint.

Save us the agony !
 

PLEASE SELL/GIVE AWAY YOUR CAR - PRONTO !!!
manguasha

Dish soap won't kill your car. Geeze people. You clean the stuff you eat off of with it!

On a car, it WILL strip any wax that is on the paint. It's a good first step to clean wax and other residues off of the paint.

I wouldn't do it by itself, because it leaves your paint unprotected. I'd do it like this:

Wash with dishsoap
Clay bar
Wash with automotive soap
Polish
Wax
Wax

I am with Mr. Adjacent on this one. I have washed a lot of cars over the millenium and always have used common dish detergent to cut the grease and road grime before polish and wax. I would not recommend washing with dish detergent and then let it sit outdoors without immediately polishing and waxing. The steps Fray takes are what I do sans the second car shampoo but that is not a bad idea. I believe the trick is to get some wax protection back on the paint asap especially if you store the car outside without a cover. IMHO.

AKL

Too funny, if you do use dish soap use the lemon scented, it will impress the studs at the local track :rolleyes:

The car soap peddlers will claim that irreplaceable precious bodily fluids are extracted from the paint when you use soaps intended for cleaning dishes, and once they're gone, they're gone forever. Subsequent waxing is like putting lipstick on a pig. It may look purty for a while, but it's a pig underneath.
I suspect that if you trade cars every 5 yrs or so, you'll never be able to tell the difference.

I have only heard of dish soap being recommended for stripping wax from a cars surface. The only person I actually know who has ever used dish soap on a regular basis is my grandmother. She drives a 1987 Buick Skylark. Either dish soap is not good for your cars surface over the long run or Buick Skylark paint jobs go from blue in color to almost white over time.

Ya, the more that I think about it if my grandmother uses it on her car you probably shouldn't. She actually uses a snow shovel to take the now off her car.