First Ever Waxstock a HUGE Success

I admit to having been a bit nervous about doing the compere job at a show all about car detailing. I learned, in the event, a lot of stuff about car paint and just how lovely it can be. I also learned that full wet sanded paint rectification to render a normally painted production BMW to look like it has been lovingly coated by Rolls-Royce and their awesome levels of workmanship, can cost thousands and result in a glass-like smoothness and mirror-finish that normal mortals, no matter how hard they polish their cars, can ever aspire to.
I learned of paint thickness in Microns and the literally DOZENS of kinds of rotary polisher machines, so much more tech than the Black & Decker polishing bonnet I once had. I witnessed 100% Carnauba wax being (eventually) melted and blended with other waxes to create a limited edition wax for Waxstock and best of all, I got to work with Michelle Westby and her mate Emily, who were adorned in naughty copper outfits as the Swirl Police. They were also dressed in little boob tubes and pelmets earlier in the day as Waxstock Girls&;.
Swirl Police

Funnily enough, one of the organisers, the blokes behind Dodo Juice (as well as the admittedly OCD Detailing World publication) had a grim experience in court for a traffic incident. He actually attempted to explain that in his native Scandinavia, they get some special Elk avoidance training and are better drivers all around. This included sometimes applying more power to avoid a problem. It’s something that I read about in a Volvo brochure as well, explaining their startling midrange grunt. (A decent SAAB will out-accelerate a Ferrari from 0 to 50!) Anyway, the resultant official response to his defence was to slap him down harder and now he has a real issue. A lass applied to work for Waxstock who was an auxiliary officer, I gather and was summarily overlooked due to her day job! (It’s a known effect of joining The Force that your social circle will ‘adjust’.)
The Swirl Police on video&;.


But back to the wax, the show was better organised than any I have ever attended. If anything, a little more slack aughta have been allowed to cope with unforeseen stuff like the fabulously costly electrical supply simply being a bit weedy to run the bed-sit cooker that was being used to cook the big Bain-Marie pan the wax was floating around in. As it was, we had a good audience around for the wet sanding of Orange peel paintwork, while the wax cookery was still ongoing.
My coverage is somewhat biased. As M/C, I was based in the Atrium Hall with the top sixteen cars while the main hall was stuffed with all sorts of detailing expertise and detailing-product companies. There were some awesome cars, like a new Adventador and lots of other exotics. But for me, the brave ones were those who just showed up to compete with the detailing on their own cars, outside. I know for a fact that LOTS of folks who could have entered, failed to for fear of being labelled 14th out of 14! Not good if you have a successful business going. But it was about the gongs only and all other scores were kept under wraps. It was about celebration and a detailers’ detail! Hell, for most folks, getting a wax down the mob-handed hand car wash with grafting East Euro lads is deemed luxury! These concours cars were something else, though! But my snappery was stage-based&;

The rules for placing the Detailing World Top Sixteen were deep and complex and many judges were asked from the sponsor companies. Then the top and bottom results of each judge were discarded to avoid any bias before making the averages up to find the winners. I was chuffed that while Jay Golinsky was a member of the Craven and Cowardly and despite his preternatural national fame as an obsessive car detailer, did not enter, nevertheless acted as my judge for awarding the £199.99 Kenwood KDC-DAB455IU digital car radio deck. Fact is, he chose the self-same car that won the top prize for the Show Up & Shine as chosen by the professional, which is cool and proves his judgement and standards!
This man will be removing one deck from his Jetta, to put this digital radio one in, instead. He gets an aerial too, of course&;

I am sure Waxstock will happen next year as well – and with a bit of luck on a different day to the mad B&B Audioconcepts groovathon that I missed on the same date! If you care at all about shininess of your car, then you need to get along to it next year. Meanwhile, Trax looms large as I type and I have a sweet last £150 worth of Dodo Juice goodies to hand out to three lucky dudes of the EMMA sound off scene, in a three-sets sort of a way. So well done to the blokes who work for Mister Skittles the Dodo Juice dodo-in-chief for a brilliant concept, well executed and universally deemed cool by show goers and exhibitors alike, who couldn’t’ quite believe how much these folks had come to shop for the best detailing stuff for less.

Here’s to next year:  ‘SQUAAAAARK!’
And here is the slideshow of the few shots I did get to take:
link