Aggressiveness of clay bar?

[brentvelo]

Just curious...if the purpose of claying the car is to remove as much if not all of the contaminants? Then why not use the MOST aggressive clay bar all the time? I saw that Meg's has 2 different levels of clay...

[weavers]

Best advice I found on auto geek is, "work least aggressive to more aggressive.

Using clay means a lot of elbow grease. I have tried a couple of different brands and ones that say aggressive and I don't see any real difference. supposedly aggressive clay is more likely to mar. so use that if you plan on compound/polish. but if its just clay and wax then use least aggressive and plenty of lube. I like onr as clay lube, but dish soap works too.

[SonOfOC]

Many of the cars detailed and posted on AG are in very good to excellent shape. However, the fanatic owners and detailers want it "perfect". In that quest, clay is required but no point of using a agressive clay when only mild is needed.

The risk of marring a dark or black colored car is too great. Mild has been my go to 90% of the time.

[Mike Phillips]

Just curious...if the purpose of claying the car is to remove as much if not all of the contaminants? Then why not use the MOST aggressive clay bar all the time? I saw that Meg's has 2 different levels of clay...

An aggressive clay bar can cause what's called Clay Haze which is a fluffy way of saying Clay Scratches. It's a marring that "can" takes place depending upon the,

Paint
Clay
Person rubbing the clay over the paint


In the professional detailing world, if the "Detailer" knows he's going to be machine compounding or polishing the paint after claying, then it's not an issue because a professional detailer understands what's taking place and also knows any haze, marring or scratching will be removed when they do the compounding and/or polishing work.


When it comes to the masses, that's the average person, many of whom may have never clayed their car's paint before, you don't what them using an aggressive clay because they may not have the knowledge to understand what's happening, nor the tools and experience to undo any damage.


So this philosophy is normally a pretty good rule of thumb for most people...

"Use the least aggressive product to get the job done"


There are exceptions as usual...

[dannythekid]

I was just thinking this question to myself yesterday.

[brentvelo]

Ok. I was just curious as to when someone would use the "aggressive" clays. I'll stick to the mild clay for now.

[oldmodman]

A few years ago I was trying to get rid of the rail dust on a friends new car. Too bad it was before Iron-X came out. I tried the Clay Magic Blue mild clay and it removed some of the embedded rail iron particles, but not all of them. Some areas I went over three times and still had some visible specks.
So I broke out the Clay Magic Red aggressive clay and even with that it took two times to get them all. Then, of course, it needed polishing to get rid of the marring caused by the aggressive clay. Not much, one pass with Menzerna PO 85 made it look better than new.

Mild clay wasn't capable of removing the embedded iron particles.