Car Interior Cleanups Help Keep Your Expensive Investment in Top Shape

Although it has only been spring for a couple of days, you're probably already thinking about projects that are awaiting you now that the days are longer and the weather's warming. Of course, there are the ones you've been dreading like painting the house, cleaning the gutters and other fun items, but there are others that need to be done, too. Indeed, they should be done because they help protect that expensive four-wheeled investment that's sitting in your driveway, your car.

Indeed, it's funny, but one of the things that we have found that makes us feel good in the spring is getting out there with the vacuum cleaner and cleaning up the gunk and grime left by the winter. There's a lot to be said for having a nice clean car interior, not the least of which is that it also helps your car retain its value.

Of course, there are the usual things that we all do to keep our cars looking nice:

* Wash and wax the exterior

* Clean the wheels

* Touch up any dings and dents

These items, though, are exterior! Have you given any thought to the interior of your vehicle? We did the other day and came up with a few items you might not think about but which can make your chariot look and feel a lot better.

Let's start with the obvious:

1. It is our experience that giving our car's interior a good vacuuming and sweeping helps us realize spring's really here. It's funny, though, how you develop certain habits. For example, every year we haul the vac outside and take all the dusting attachments and do a complete interior vacuuming. However, there are parts where even multiple passes with the vacuum won't remove all of the grime. To conquer that, we've acquired a set of smaller stiff-haired brushes that we can use to remove dirt and grime from hard-to-reach and clean areas, such as the area around the floor-shift-mounted PRNDL gearshift lever. We use a small dust brush or brisk boar's bristle brush to get into the cracks and crevices where dust and dirt collect. You can also use a small whisk broom in larger areas.

Here's another good tip: be sure to clean thoroughly under the seats -- you would be surprised what can collect there; make sure that you lift up any wiring looms so that any dust dirt won't remain.

2. Clean and treat the plastic and nonmetallic. There are any number of upholstery cleaning kits out there, for example, AutoGeek.net offers two products, Ultima Interior Shampoo that uses a spray and wipe technique. You simply spray the cleaner on the surface -- the instrument panel, for example -- and you then wipe away the grim and dirt. A second part of the treament, Ultima Interior Guard, is a clearcoat sealer that you spray on the area you've just cleaned to seal it against further dirt and grime. A fortunate byproduct is that this will also guard against ultraviolet light damage and industrial pollution damage. They are reasonably priced in the $5 to $20 range.

3. Dyson offers an interesting set of attachments for its upright vacuum cleaner. It's called the Dyson Clean Car Kit and features two heads for the vacuum cleaner and a very stiff brush for the stubborn dirt you find in tight areas such as in the PRNDL floor-mount shifter housing or in any of the crevices you find between. This is not an inexpensive option as it costs $84.95, but it does include a turbine head that will remove all hair and grit from your car's upholstery and it will remove grit and grime from crevices and hard-to-reach areas. This is called the Flexi-Crevice tool and extends the Turbine head into hard-to-reach areas. The final part of the tool is the Stubborn Dirt Brush that features very tough, stiff bristles and removes dirt and grime from areas where normal brushes won't work.

4. Meguiars offers a complete line of leather upholstery cleaning products that not only include cleaners and spotters (for lifting hard-to-clean spots) but also to sealers. Meguiars, which also makes a complete line of car-cleaning products, has been in the car-cleaning business for more than a century and knows a thing or two about interior cleaning. Using their products is easy as all it requires is a clean, lint-free rag to apply products and a clean, lint-free rag to wipe it off. Easy-to-use, it should easily remove the stains and dirt that have built up over the winter. Use Meguiars sealer to make sure the leather is sealed.

5. A little-remembered area to clean is the interior glasswork. Under the glare of the sun and ultraviolet light, automotive plastics emit invisible emissions that do build up on interior of the windows. A good product to remove this is made by RainX. They are also the folks that make the wetting agent for windshields that causes water to bead up and lessen the need for windshield wipers. They also make a line of interior glass-cleaning products that helps to combat the buildup of film from plastic emissions cause d by the sun.

(source: AutoGeeks.com. Dyson.com, RainX.com, Meguiars.com, author)