A Snow Foam virgin no more!

[B19GRR]

Let me start out by saying I fecking hate washing cars, but I've got fed up of funding Crazy Vaclev and his Albanian Devils, so I splashed out on a foam lance and snow foam from Auto Rae Chem hoping this would be a simple and fun way to do the job quickly.

Hmmmm, I'm not entirely convinced. Seemed to foam up fine and dwelled for 5 mins or so, but I did get through two fills of the lance bottle, so I'm not too sure if I've got the lance settings quite right or if I was spending too much time getting a good thick layer of the stuff on the car. My mix was about 1" of snow foam and topped up with warm water. There seems to be no real solid recommendation for how to use the stuff, but that was the most common suggestion I could find. Most other suggestions involved mixing up a witches brew of various potions that are known only to those in the know by their abbreviations

I've also bought a Bilt Hamber starter kit, auto-wash shampoo, clay and auto-balm as the fact you don't need any fancy spray to work with the clay appealled. After the foaming I shampooed the car with the not very sudsy auto-wash stuff. If the weather holds I'll break out the clay and wax tomorrow.

At least the large microfibre drying cloth I bought did what it was supposed to with no fuss!

Of course the real downside to cleaning a car is all the crappy stone chips and blemishes suddenly come in to sharp focus, quite depressing really

Here endeth the ramblings 'cos I've now forgotten what my point was

Cheers,
Rob

[PJ S]

You're point was you're a lazy fecker who's now starting to get a bit of a taste for keeping the car clean!
Seriously though, the foam sounds like you used too much product, as well as spent too long meandering round the car - a 1/2L should be sufficient for doing a car and wheels, even with the adjuster on the foam lance whacked up full.
Following Bilt Hamber's recommendation for their Autofoam, the strength of foam should be 4-5% on the panel, and how you work this out is to do a bit of maths and have a bucket with measurements on the inside or a clear container which you mark with a marker after pouring in measured 1L amounts.

Basically, put 1L into the foamer, adjust to full position, then empty into the marked container.
Total volume of water x 4-5% is the amount of foam you need.
Eg - say 17L is in the container (or you've emptied it once already at 10, and there's now 7) then the lance at that setting is running at 16:1 mix ratio (likely to be higher - 5-6:1)
So, 5% of 17L = 850 ml, but as you should only really need half that, then each foaming session would require 425ml with 75ml of water.
If you find the resultant foam too thick, then knock back the adjuster to find the setting which gives the nice thick double cream consistency, and redo the above to find the amount of foam required for that lance position.

A bit of tinkering I'll grant you, but only needs done once for you then to know how much product to use without making the solution too rich (stripping the wax/sealant) or too weak (a waste of effort, time, and product).