How to Properly Wax Your Motorcycle

Why Should I Wax my Motorcycle?

You can have the road dirt, dust, ultraviolet rays, rain soaked with smog and bugs attack your paint or attack a layer of wax. Which do you want? All that wax does is sacrifice itself instead of your paint taking the punishment. Think of it as semi-permanent SPF-40 protection for your paint. Just like suntan lotion protects your skin from damage, so does a good coat of wax.

What kind of Wax Should I Use on My Motorcycle?

Nature seems to always have the answer for us on many things. For some reason, we cannot invent something that God hasn’t already perfected. There is a plant that grows in a very hostile environments on the planet. This plant just happens to secrete the best wax known to man.

Carnauba Wax – The Best Wax God Ever Made!

Carnauba is a wax derived from the leaves of the carnauba palm tree. This tree grows only in northeastern Brazil. The wax coats the leaves of this palm tree and is collected by literally “beating the wax” off the palm leaves. The wax is then collected and refined for use in many applications including ours (motorcycle wax) and lipstick (so think about that next time you kiss your wife, girlfriend or bike!.)

Carnauba wax in its purest form is harder than concrete. Therefore, it must be mixed with solvents in order to be useful for our application. The best Carnauba-based waxes contain no cleaners or abrasives that could damage your paint. Carnauba wax is also very expensive if it is purified to a high grade level (#1 white or yellow are the highest). Many waxes on the market advertise themselves as “100% Carnauba wax”, this is completely misleading since 100% Carnauba wax could not even be applied to your paint!

While chemists have tried to duplicate the natural properties of Carnauba wax with polymer waxes, in my opinion they come up short on two levels. First, they tend to absorb water thereby causing clouding on the paint. Secondly, you have no idea what is in them, how they will react to touching rubber, acrylic windshields, chrome, billet or leather. It is personal preference, but I have tried a bunch of products on my bike and find Carnauba wax to give my paint the deepest shine -especially on dark paint (black especially).

Paste or Spray Wax for my Motorcycle?

Again this is personal preference but I go with the paste wax for my motorcycle. The reason spray wax is easier to work with is that it contains a much smaller amount of Carnauba wax and a higher concentration of solvents in order to get out of the spray can. Since there is not a lot of paint on a motorcycle, the extra time I use in rubbing the paste wax onto the surface is really not that much. This concentration-issue is also the reason why the paste wax is more expensive than a spray bottle of wax.