Cotton or Microfiber cloths ????

D

DM101

New member
I have a boat load of MF towels... But I wonder if good quality cotton just might be better. Zanio reccommends Cotton. Lets hear it !!
 
I am a mostly a microfiber guy...it's somewhat easier to find a reputable MF towel vendor these days. I have a few DF cotton towels that are almost 7 years old - they still perform great but they were fairly expensive and the vendor has developed a bad rep over the past couple of years.



There's just a lot of good places to pickup quality, non-scratching microfiber. As Brad mentioned, definitely try various levels of plushness for different tasks...it makes a big difference.
 
I haven't tried yet cotton for buffing wax. Perhaps I will try at some point.



So far I use Eurow yellow mf's for buffing wax, Cobra WW and edgeless for drying and polish/glaze buffing, random mf for glass scrubbing and dedicated glass towel for last touch on glass.
 
Yeah I have many 550+ g/m2 +++ MF towels. They work great. But I'd still like to try cotton for buffing off waxes and sealants.
 
Remember DF Towels?



I still have mine and over the years, mostly used them to remove carnauba. They're more like a different feel than anything else when compared to typical 80/20 or 70/30 polyester polyamide MF.
 
Bill D said:
Remember DF Towels?



I still have mine and over the years, mostly used them to remove carnauba. They're more like a different feel than anything else when compared to typical 80/20 or 70/30 polyester polyamide MF.
Click to expand...



Closest towel I've found to DFTowel thus far is Swisswax, but not as good as DFT (Pakshak has some DFT in stock recently)



Conversely the same attributes that make Microfiber so good at cleaning have an adverse affect when applying wax. A polymer sealant forms a molecular bond with the paint surface, so when you remove it, you are removing excess product. An organic wax however, doesn’t form a bond with the paint surface but merely adheres to it, forming a chain-link type coating.
 
Some sorta-random thoughts on cotton vs. (synthetic) MF follow:



-cotton works great for buffing off wax (more bite than MF makes it nice for tough-to-buff LSPs) but only until it somehow causes marring. And unfortunately, IME that always happens sooner or later

-I think it was AI/ValueGard that once had magnified pix of what "very soft" 100% cotton did to previously marring-free paint, wasn't pretty

-conversely, at least in the sense that YMMV, somebody here once tested cotton and MF on a black Porsche and found that *his* cotton caused zero micromarring, no issues at all and it's not like nobody had perfect paint in the days before MF

-when the "MF removes too much LSP!" thing first came out (gee, it was my pals at TOL too, hate to :argue with Irene and her folks, but...) I did half-and-half experiments and found *ZERO* evidence that conventional/plush MF removed excess product. No diff in durability at all, for instance

-I use MF exclusively for buffing off polish/LSP residue these days, but I do use different *types* of MF including suede-style/low-nap, which sometimes works best for certain sealants

-for some situations I do still prefer cotton; e.g., when blowing water out of nooks and crannies I'll hold a cotton towel (stationary) nearby and blow the water into it. In cases like that, cotton simply soaks up the water better for me than MF does

-and I use cotton extensively when doing interiors. Also use it for the initial passes on really bad windows
 
Well it looks like in general, I should just stick to my multitudes of MF towels. My garage looks like I run a full blown detail shop!!! To much stuff!!!
 
Bill D said:
Remember DF Towels?



I still have mine and over the years, mostly used them to remove carnauba. They're more like a different feel than anything else when compared to typical 80/20 or 70/30 polyester polyamide MF.
Click to expand...



Those DFT/CBTs were interesting..."cotton MFs".



Some of mine were softer than others from the start, and David once replaced a whole bunch of them that I considered simply awful.



Some of my softest ones still caused very light marring on GM clear.



Like my other cotton towels, they always ended up getting a bit stiff/etc. ("not soft"). I blame my (filtered and conditioned) water. Yeah, I can render them OK with a tiny bit of Ultra Downy fabric softener same as my other cotton textiles, but that was completely counter to Leo's admonition that such stuff is unnecessary at best and potentially detrimental.



[I've discussed my fabric softener use enough here that I won't get into it on this thread except to say that I've had *ZERO* issues from it as long as I stick with the Ultra Downy and don't overdo it.]
 
Mine still perform well but I rarely use them; I just have too many "regular" MFs. I use them mostly for Souveran removal on the A4- no marring :clap: but I'm finding I'm just using my others even for that lately.
 
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