I guess I have not been giving this wax enough credit.
Yesterday I was driving home, the sun was shining, the sky was clear and I was blown away by how shiny my XF looked. As I looked across the hood I could see a perfect shine.

The amazing thing is that I haven't waxed my baby since mid-October. Since then it has suffered the indignity of at least a dozen automated car washes.

Hopefully the weather will warm up soon and my baby can get a new coat of wax soon. Meanwhile, thank you McGuire.

 

I had that same experience with mine on Friday. It was warm here, driving home I saw a shine on the hood and just had to wax it for the first time since I got it in December. Who knows how long before that the dealership had done it, but after all those auto washes, the car still looked darn good.

 

Glad you guys are liking the NXT 2.0 so much.

A little tip when using it, especially on dark colors: apply a very, very thin coat to all the painted surfaces of the vehicle and then let it dry for an hour or more. Clean the interior of the car, dress the leather, dress the tires, clean the engine bay, clean up the garage or just go have lunch. Just give it an hour, or even a couple of hours, to dry. Of course, you want it to be in a garage so it's not getting a ton of dust landing on it, but just let it dry for a good long time. Wipe off will still be crazy easy (I've let it sit for 4 hours or more) and you'll eliminate the chance of any temporary streaking.

The product contains some polishing oils, which is why it makes dark colors look extra nice. But those same polishing oils means it takes a bit longer to dry. If your ambient temp is below 60F it will just prolong the drying time.

Super thin coat. Long dry time. Looks fantastic.

 

Ok, I've been a fan of the TW Ice and while I've polished a couple of times and it still looks great, I'll give the Nxt a try later this spring to see how it compares. I don't mind switching to see what looks best. Do you have a reco on a claybar application to remove any of the old stuff?

 

Any clay bar will remove your old wax - Meguiar's, Mother's, ClayMagic..... whatever you like or can find easily.

 

I used the Turtle Wax Ice clay bar kit....followed by the Ice wax. Started at like 11am finished 5pm...this was with detailing interior but mostly buffing all day. The finish is glowing!!

 

6 hours just to clay and wax????? Did you use their Liquid Clay Bar?

I am biting my tongue so hard right now...... I hate to bad mouth the competition but of all the products on the market today I am least impressed, and by a HUGE margin, with TW Ice products. I may work for Meguiar's so I don't want to sound like I'm just being biased here; I would so much rather see someone use Mother's or Adam's or Zaino or almost anything else before using Turtle Wax.

 

Now now Mike


I too have been very fond of my TW Ice experiences to include the liquid clay bar; thus far anybody that has seen it has been thoroughly impressed by the shine and overall appearance. But I'm nowhere near experienced as you and by all definitions, I'm closing in on amature status.

Still I'm going to try what you reco'd (here and in numerous posts) and see what the difference is first hand. I should have time this weekend with full use of the garage since the wife is gone all day Saturday. Heck, I'll even be able to test out the 4hour or more timeframe you mentioned.

 

A little off topic, but I saw a truck today in Tulsa, Ok.... it was pulling a trailer with an old classic car, well what was left of one( project??) anyways whe I pulled up to pass the truck it had some graphics and Meguiars written on it. Was this just a random truck or a company truck picking up a car to build and turn into a show car???? You might not have a clue, just curious...

Also I have heard alot of this wax on here and will try it next time I do my car... Its black and I need something good, when its clean I love it, but damn it gets dirty fast!

 

i like the turtle wax ice too, you just have to put it on in very thin coats. some people pour it on lol. it is very close to the shine that zaino gives in about 1/100th of the time to apply it.

 

These (TWIce) products were discussed AT LENGTH in 2007 here on this forum. Some good info to be had.

https://www.crossfireforum.org/forum...ghlight=Turtle

https://www.crossfireforum.org/forum...ghlight=Turtle
( In this thread, I wrote a little review. I have since changed my tune.)

https://www.crossfireforum.org/forum...ghlight=Turtle

https://www.crossfireforum.org/forum...ghlight=Turtle

I still have that jar of paste and 1/2 bottle of liquid TWIce.
I found that there is nothing better for making the gray plastic cowl look new than this stuff, but NXT 2.0 is my weapon of choice. Looks like glass and lasts almost as long...

 

I had read so much about TW Ice, both good and bad, so I wanted to test it out for myself. Same goes for Liquid Glass. Anyway, a few months ago I did a test on the hood of our (former) Camaro to see what was what.

First thing I did was to apply a paint cleaner to the entire hood to remove any wax that may have been on it - I wanted this to be a fair test with nothing to contaminate the results. The body lines in the hood were natural break points to apply 3 different products and leave one section bare as a control. So, following the directions on the bottles, I applied TW Ice to section #1, NXT 2.0 to section #2, and Liquid Glass to section #3, leaving section #4 bare. (One deviation from written instructions here - Liquid Glass says to apply it with a coarse cloth using straight back and forth strokes. I am NOT going to touch ANY car's paint with a "coarse cloth".) Initial observations were that Liquid Glass dried the fastest of the three. In fact, it dried extremely fast and you had to be especially careful not to put it on too heavy. TW Ice went on very oily and even after 10 minutes on the surface it would smear like baby oil if I ran my finger across it. When all three products were wiped off, the TW Ice side didn't feel very slick at all - in fact it was quite similar to the "control" panel! And to be totally honest, if I had to choose an overall "slickness" winner, it would be the Liquid Glass, by a nose (so to speak).

The car spent only a single day in the rain, and only a light to moderate rain at that. Hey, this is SoCal, we don't get a ton of the wet stuff here! A week after applying the products I washed the car at home, using Gold Class Car Wash Shampoo & Conditioner. The photo with the red lines and numbers was taken after just rinsing the car with water - it had NOT been washed yet. A couple of things to note here: beading is very uniform across the surface, regardless of what product was used. But take special note of the following - the "control" section is beading just as well as the three waxed sections, but there is ZERO protection on that area. Remember, this was just a pure paint cleaner that stripped any existing wax. So why is it beading? Well, unless you wipe a panel down with alcohol or something similar, you're bound to leave a little something of any product behind. And that little something is going to alter the surface tension to some degree and potentially cause water beading. This is why we always say that beading is not necessarily a sign of protection. I guarantee you that the paint cleaner I used provides no protection whatsoever. But it will alter the surface tension to some degree. More importantly, that paint cleaner is water soluble, so once the car is washed I expect it to be completely gone.

The second picture is after washing the car and rinsing it completely. I then took the nozzle off the hose and allowed a smooth, steady stream of water to flow over the hood, sheeting the water off. I use this process to speed drying, otherwise you end up having to dry all the water drops you saw in the first picture. Now, just as expected, the NXT 2.0 section shed the water very effectively and the Liquid Glass appeared to be its equal. This is what you want to have happen, and both of these products performed beautifully here. The "control" section is now also doing what one would expect - no protection, any residual product has been washed away, and the water is just laying there in a sheet. But the really telling thing is, the TW Ice side is doing the exact same thing! This indicates a significant change in surface tension - one that is only going to happen when something is applied to, or removed from, the surface. One week, one wash, and the TW Ice was gone. I am not impressed.

 

comparing a detailer polish to a wax?

 

I want to add something else here:

Most of you know that I work for Meguiar's, but if you read a lot of my posts you know I'm pretty open minded about this whole detailing game and I'm not trying to convert everyone to Meguiar's. Guys like FP and others are huge fans of Adam's Polishes and when you look at pictures of FP's stunning black Crossfire it's really hard to try and tell him he shouldn't be using those products. So I don't. Truth is, Adam's products are excellent - period. Plenty of others are too, but some suffer from an over abundance of hype and will cost you more money than you probably need to spend. Chief among those would be, IMHO, Zaino. I used to use their products exclusively and loved them, but I now know I can get equal or better results for a lot less money. Pinnacle is another company who makes truly excellent products, but again they tend to be quite pricey. Not everything in their line, but certainly quite a few. And in my job I get to play with a ton of different products on a whole bunch of different cars.

Still, if you find that you're getting your best results using Zaino or Pinnacle, or any other high end boutique product, go for it. Who am I to stop you? When you consider how many people out there with really nice cars are just running them through an automatic car wash and never even bothering to wax them (hey, the car was has a wax at the end, right????), I would much rather see you routinely use Zaino, Pinnacle, P21S, Mother's, Adam's, etc and really take care of it, than simply neglect the finish.

But on the flip side, if I come across something that seriously turns me off, I have no problems letting people know that, too. And TW Ice seriously turns me off.

One last thing, the tape strip on the deck of my Roadster is faded from sitting on a dealer lot for two years, so it has this sort of half and half look to it. TW Ice makes it look absolutely fantastic. For about a day.

 

That's just a matter of symantics. Zaino calls their stuff "polish" but it's actually a synthetic sealant. Then again, this is directly from the TW web site:

Liquid Polish
ICEŽ is a clear wax formulated with completely new technology that blends silicone and hydrocarbon polymers to provide extraordinary shine and durability.


So why not ask Turtle Wax themselves, is it a polish or a wax? They call it both. But if you really want to classify TW Ice as a polish in the sense that we have things like M07 Show Car Glaze, then you shouldn't expect it to last or provide any protection. That's not what a true polish is designed to do. Yet TW claims protection from the product. So again, what is it?

Unfortunately there are no hard and fast rules regarding terminology in this industry.

 

i use it as a quick detailer and do not expect it to last, it works great for me.

the new bottles say it lasts something like 4x longer if i recall correctly. i haven't tried it though.

i have about 6 or 7 different kinds of wax including some meguiars gold. They all seem about the same to me if you apply/remove them the right way. None have really shown any major shine differences. the ice is just super simple/easy to put on and take off.

 

Thanks, Mike. This is what I found too.

P.S. I was able to make the roadster strip look much better quite by accident: When using my PC 7424 I went over it with Step 1 Mequiars Paint cleaner. The gray area turned black. I used NXT 2.0 on it and it stayed that way for , well, it still looks pretty good 3 months later.

 

I've been using Gold Class Trim Detailer with pretty good success. So far it's the best thing I've found for long term use..... well, medium term is more like it since the fade is so bad. But seriously, for that first day the TW Ice is applied to it, the thing looks brand new. But the next day it doesn't look like I did anything to it at all.

 

Mike,

the point I was trying to make is that the paint cleaner might (?) have been just abrasive enough to turn the strip "back to black". Do you think this assumption has credence?
I agree with the Ice making it look great, but WD40 or Vaseline will do the same. In the short term.
I applied the NXT knowing full well that if it turned white or chalky because of the surface irregularities, I could take it right back off with alcohol.
But I didn't have to!
After I let it cure with the rest of the wax job, it came off and left a nice BLACK satin finish. Not as good as new, but way lots better than it was and it only recently started to turn gray again.

What do you think?

 

I guess it's possible, Max, considering Deep Crystal Paint Cleaner is a combination of very mild mechanical abrasives and light chemical cleaning action. It's also quite possible that your pad had as much, or more, to do with improving the look of the vinyl tape strip. It's a bit hard to say since neither of those products was developed with a porous vinyl substrate in mind! But we do see some weird things from time to time so you never know. I just might have try it this weekend!