Dude, you don’t need to wash that every weekend
Sometimes you see dudes with their muscle cars washing and waxing them every weekend like their life depends on it. They’re hoping to get chicks with a radical looking car. But even for sweet rides, washing them all the time isn’t necessary.
Why You Need to Wash Your Car
The only reason you really need to wash your car is if you live in a place that puts a lot of salt on the roads in the wintertime. If you’re living in the South, this isn’t you. If you live in the North, this is you.
Salt kills cars. Frequent cleaning gets that salt off so that your car doesn’t crud up and die.
This car has so much salt on it that this sheep thing is licking the salt off
When you wash your car to get the salt off, don’t forget the undercarriage.
Car Wash or Hand Wash?
HAND WASH. I can’t emphasize that enough. Car washes do this terrible thing where the water comes at your car under high pressures. This forces water into places on your car that it shouldn’t be in normally. It forces water into cracks and crevices, which exacerbates (yeah, I pulled out a big word) them and makes them become bigger problems, faster.
Oh and don’t forget, it’s cheaper to wash your car by hand anyway.
How Often to Wash Your Car
Rain is often a good enough car wash
When its not the wintertime, I don’t wash my truck that often because, who cares? I’m not trying to impress anyone. I usually wash my truck about once per month to get excess bugs, dirt, and grit off. And truth, God usually washes my car. Letting the rain do its thing is often good enough for the function of your car.
In the wintertime, depending on how often they salt the roads and how often you drive, you should be washing your car once every week or two to get that salt off.
Got a question about car or home maintenance, how to fix something, what a certain tool is, why contractors act some way, or something else blue collar? Ask in the comments below and maybe I’ll answer it for you if you’re lucky. So you gotta ask yourself, do you feel lucky?
Photo credits: Dude washing car, salty car, flickr user Dale Mastin