Most beginners know the jobs. What they get wrong is the order — and the order is what decides whether the paint ends up better or worse than when it arrived. Work through a full car here: pick what comes next, and find out exactly what goes wrong when you get it out of sequence.
Pick the step that comes next in a professional process.
A guide to sequence and reasoning, not a substitute for practice on a panel you can afford to learn on. Products and dwell times vary by brand — always read the label. Your progress is saved only in this browser.
Four sequence mistakes account for most ruined jobs.
Wheels before paint. Wheel cleaners and brake dust splash. Do the wheels after you have washed the car and you are washing it twice — or leaving fallout on clean paint.
Decontaminate before you polish. A machine pad over bonded fallout or tar drags it across the panel. You are not correcting the paint at that point, you are adding damage.
Panel wipe before protection. Polishing oils fill swirls and make the finish look better than it is — and no coating or sealant bonds through them. Skip the wipe and your work disappears with the first wash.
Dressings last. Tyre and trim dressing slings. Apply it before the final wipe-down and you spend the next ten minutes cleaning it off the paint you just protected.
When you have the sequence down, price the work properly with the pricing & profit calculator, and write it up as a repeatable process with the SOP / checklist builder so every car gets the same treatment.
You can polish like a pro and still lose the job because you were under a dash when it rang. Missed-call text-back answers for you, so the work you just learned to do actually reaches your calendar.
See how it works →The sequence questions beginners ask most, answered in order.
Exterior: wheels and tyres first, then a pre-rinse, bugs and tar, a foam pre-wash, the contact wash top-down with two buckets, iron remover, clay, rinse and dry. Then inspect under light, do a test spot, machine correct, panel wipe, apply protection, and finish with glass, trim and tyre dressing.
Interior: strip it out, do all the dry work first (blow out, brush, vacuum top-down), then the wet work (stain treatment, extraction), then leather, then hard surfaces, and glass absolutely last.
Because they are the dirtiest part of the car and the chemicals used on them splash. Wheel cleaner, brake dust and road grime thrown onto paint you have already washed means washing it again — and if you have already dried and polished, it means fallout landing on a finished surface. Wheels first is the cheapest time you will ever save.
Yes, and iron remover before that. Washing lifts what is loose; it does not touch what is bonded — embedded brake dust, tar, overspray, tree sap. Run a machine pad over that and you drag it across the clear coat, which puts in new scratches while you are trying to take scratches out.
The test is your hand in a thin bag: if the paint feels gritty, it is not ready for a pad.
It is one small section where you find the least aggressive pad and compound combination that actually clears the defects, before committing to the whole car. Paint hardness varies enormously between makes and even between panels, so the combination that worked on the last car may do nothing here — or cut far too much.
Clear coat is finite and cannot be put back. The test spot is how you avoid finding that out on a customer's hood.
It is a wipe-down with a dedicated prep spray or diluted IPA after polishing, to strip the oils left behind by the compound. You cannot skip it for two reasons: those oils temporarily fill fine swirls, so the paint looks better than it is and you may stop correcting too early, and no sealant or ceramic coating will bond through them.
Skipping it is the single most common reason a coating fails within weeks.
Interior first if you are working alone, for one practical reason: vacuuming, blowing out vents and beating mats throws dust everywhere, and you do not want that landing on freshly washed and protected paint. Doing the inside first also means the car can be drying outside while you work.
Within the interior itself the rule is dry work before wet work, and glass last.
Considerably longer than you expect. A thorough wash and decontamination alone is a couple of hours done properly, and a single-stage machine correction on top of that turns it into a full day. Experienced detailers are quicker because their process is fixed and nothing is repeated — not because they rush any individual step.
Time yourself honestly, then price from those real hours with the pricing & profit calculator rather than guessing.
