VCCA Home Forums GENERAL DISCUSSION General Discussions Best way to remove old wax

My car was repainted with lacquer paint about 40 years ago and is starting to spiderweb in spots. I know a repaint is most likely in my future but for now I just want to maintain what is left.
The last person to wax it was probably sometime in the 90s and they did a horrible job removing the dried wax. So I want to clean it all off and start over.
What is the best way to get the old wax off? On a normal car I would just wash it with a degreasing soap, but I can't really take the garden hose to this one.
Just wondering if there is a good spray-on wipe-off product that will remove any old wax?

I've been reading that Meguiars #7 is a great product for this older paint so I may go with that once I get the old wax off. Any recommendations?

mineral sprits..............

As Gene says mineral spirits will work fine. Body shops use wax and grease remover. Dupont's used to be called Prepsol but that was years ago. I don't know if they still make it. Any paint jobber will have the equivalent in whatever brand of paint they sell.

Thanks for the info. That is what I am looking for since I have a few spots to touch up after removing the wax. I didn't think about asking a body shop what they use.

Just be sure to use two rags. One with the solvent and a clean/dry one to wipe it off. Wipe it off while still wet. If you let it dry all you're doing is moving the contamination around. If you're doing a large area change clean/dry rags often.

So what causes lacquer to don that? My neighbour’s car did that too,

Usually because it was sprayed too thick.

Lacquer isn't as flexible as newer paint. Spiderwebbing is common with lacquer paint as it ages. Especially, as Ray noted, if it's been repainted. Another down side of lacquer is every time you touch it you lose paint. When you polish your car, that color on your rag is oxydized paint leaving your vehicle.

When you say Lacquer is not as flexible as newer paint are you talking about Enamel paint. Is their any other types of paint ? Those are the only two I know of.

I'm not sure about the very modern paints because I haven't been in the field for a number of years but when I was a bodyman/painter acrylic lacquer was just becoming widely used. It's more flexible than the old line lacquer (acrylic is plastic). Enamel based products are also more flexible. Lacquer's strong point is it polishes to a very high sheen. It's weak points are it doesn't age well. It oxidizes rapidly and requires frequent polishing to keep the luster. Because it requires frequent polishing the paint is lost more rapidly (the color on your rag). Finally it's not as flexible as other paints so it has a tendency to craze, sometimes called spiderwebbing. The modern stuff like waterborn and the like I have no clue.

This is exactly what the PO said. His brother painted it and put too much on it.
So far it is only the black paint that it spiderwebbing. The blue looks pretty good.

Preps all is still made and very handy. It will remove the wax, oil residue etc. I have used it on oil and grease on fabric interiors and carpeting when I worked in the detail department at the family dealership. The body shop would wipe down primered surfaces before painting them to remove any wax or oil residue from hand prints. I've used it on pine pitch on finished paint surfaces. I've also used it on clothing if I had accidently gotten grease on a shirt etc.

The process of refining oil is basically one of heating what comes out of the ground and capturing what comes out. Pretty much like a alcohol still.

Oil is not a chemical but a mixture of different stuff. This stuff is made up of basically hydrogen and carbon molecules that form a chain. There is stuff with a whole range of chain sizes. The longer the chain, the heavier, thicker the stuff. Generally, longer the chain, the slower it reacts to Oxygen..... BOOM.....

When heated, The short chains boil off quick because they are light and are then captured as a gas like propane, butane, acetylene, etc.... and put in tanks, usually compressed to get more in.
As the chain gets longer, it’s gets heavier and you can put it in a can..... gasoline, diesel fuel, kerosene.... etc...

As you go down and get longer chains you get to things like paraffin wax (not bees wax) stuff you wax your car with.... and eventually to stuff you mix with ash to make the stuff you put on roads.

The point of all this is that the stuff with the smallest chain will brake down or dissolve the ones with the longer chains. If you want to remove tar (long chain...) then use anything that has a shorter chain like diesel, shorter yet... kerosene, mineral sprits, maybe gasoline. You need to be careful now because gasoline has a lot of small chains in it that when released in the air (that’s why you can smell it) react with Oxygen in the air and go boom. Blows fast so you don’t need a lot of compression whereas if you use diesel, it’s a longer chain, doesn’t react with Oxygen so easily (SAFER) so you will need a high compression engine to get it to react.

Diesel is safer to clean greasy parts (grease has a longer chain than Diesel) but slower than using gasoline which has a shorter chain than diesel. Remember gasoline goes boom.


Soooooo... if you want to get rid of paraffin wax (which is what most wax is), use something that has a small enough chain that will dissolve the wax, breaking down the long chains of the wax into shorter ones that will fly off into the air. ..... you will need to to go to short chains like mineral spirits, acetone etc to dissolve the wax...... if you can smell it, it’s probably a short chain (solvent).

If you use something like diesel or kerosene , they will leave some long chains around (grease feeling) and you will need something short chain to get rid of that.
That works well though with cleaning parts. Long chain solvents (kerosene, diesel) don’t evaporate fast so they stay in the parts cleaning tank longer and it’s available and cheap. You can then wipe the part down with a short chain solvent to get rid of the residue from the tank solvent.

Don’t use gasoline, it has a lot of short chains in it and goes boom..... not good....

One last note about car wax (or any wax for that matter). You don’t really know what’s in it so be careful what short chain solvent you use. You might just dissolve something you didn’t want to.... always test first....

Always read the label and/or check with the product manufacturer.

Mike