| Does anyone know a good cure for removing little spots of black road tar off of paintwork? It was so hot the other day I think one of the roads near me must have started to melt as I had sticky gravel in my tyres and little black spots around the wheel arches and on the bumper. Any tried & tested cures out there before I remove my paintwork? (5/00) |
| Autoglym tar remover (red label) Gets out all this little spots off even ones that I thought were minor scratches. Some scratches that didn't get through the paint will disappear too. Very good stuff. (5/00) |
| Good old WD40; squirt it on, rub off tar, wash down with water and repolish. (5/00) |
| Autoglym Intensive Tar Remover. It works well on tar, and is also good at removing the last traces of those horrible sticky labels which shops put on most products these days. Also for removing unwanted advertising on cars from a dealer! (5/00) |
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Alternative to suggestions already given, if they don't work. I earned some brownie points by cleaning my bosses car after she drove through a tar puddle. Isopropanol Cleaning Solvent works great, and in her case didn't affect the paintwork. You can buy it from RS components, or electronic component shops (possibly Maplins?). There is a much stronger alternative called Tri-chloro Ethylene, obtained from the same sort of places, but may affect paintwork, it certainly eats certain plastics. (5/00) |
| I have some Autoglym Intensive Tar Remover but to be honest I've never needed to use it. I find that any tar spots that appear on my car can be removed easily enough using Autoglym Super Resin Polish (works well on the insides of the alloys too). I guess this might depend on the type of paint though - my car is a metallic so it has a hard layer of lacquer over the paint (hard but thin and brittle - chips easily), I believe solid colours are not lacquered so may require a different approach. (5/00) |
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There is a much stronger alternative called Tri-chloro Ethylene, obtained from the same sort of places, but may affect paintwork, it certainly eats certain plastics. Tric is now unavailable, I believe, as it's rather dangerous stuff (certainly, you can't buy it anymore for PCB cleaning: about 10 years ago when we made expansion cards for acorns, our PCB assembler used to build all our units in his garden shed. He'd come out high as a kite after cleaning PCBs...) (5/00) |
| I find the Autoglym polish removes the smaller dots of tar but to get shot of the big lumps that appear sometimes I use the Intensive tar remover. Only thing I think then is you have to go over the area with polish again as I would expect the tar remover to also remove the wax. (5/00) |
| Isopropanol (isopropyl alcohol, propan-2-ol) is an excellent degreaser. You can sometimes find it in little plastic bottles for cleaning tape heads etc in the audio section of department stores etc. Don't rub too hard with it as it will start to remove the MX-5s oh so delicate paint job (as will Auotglym's tar remover if rubbed too hard). Oh look, I've got a little bottle if 1,1,1-trichloroethane on my desk in front of me, excellent for removing the sticky residues left after you rip plasters off your skin. That'll remove tar too, not sure what it'll do to paint though. Lots of other things will help dissolve tar (eg petrol) but I'm more used to advising on removing it from skin. Eucalyptus oil useful for getting it out of grazes, wounds etc. Hmm, that would leave your 5 smelling nice and it would clear your head as you drove along! (5/00) |
| White spirit or meths also work and boy they smell and taste good "hic" don't forget to re polish after (5/00) |
| For tar spots there is proprietary tar remover from 'Auto Glym' it's called, oddly enough, "Intensive Tar Remover". I have used it for years and it's a good product. (5/00) |