Detailing & Wax is an independent guide to detailing your own car

Who writes this

Every page on this site is written under one byline: Mike M., the hands-on owner behind Iron Mako Media. There is no staff, no rotating cast of freelancers, and no “expert panel”.

There is also no photograph here, and that is deliberate. A stock portrait or an AI-generated face presented as a real person is a small lie, and a site whose entire argument is that it tells you the truth about products cannot start with one.

What we have not done

We have not used these products. Not one of the 169 products on this site has been through our hands, and every page says so in a label at the top rather than in small print at the bottom.

This matters because the alternative is common. While researching this site we found a wedding and catering venue ranking for “best dual action polishers” while claiming eighty hours of testing, and a general-interest site whose nav runs Gaming, History, Bible and Celebrities ranking first for a beginner polisher term with a hands-on testing claim from a games writer.

Both of those claims are easy to make and impossible to check. Ours is the opposite: we tell you exactly what our picks are built from, and you can verify every figure against the manufacturer source we cite.

What we actually do

• Resolve every product to a real, currently-sold Amazon listing, and check the returned title matches the product we meant before writing anything about it.
• Pull every price live rather than typing one in. Prices older than 48 hours disappear and the button falls back to Check price.
• Cite the manufacturer source for every published specification, and write Not published rather than estimating when a manufacturer does not publish one.
• Read the patterns across verified-purchase reports for the failure modes that specifications never show — the bearing noise, the seal that fails in a year, the backing plate that wobbles.
• Say plainly when a cheaper product is the better buy, which a retailer that stocks the expensive one cannot.

The full method, including the rubric behind every score, is on how we pick.

How this is funded

Iron Mako Media earns an Amazon commission when you buy through our links, at no extra cost to you. That is the only revenue this site has: no sponsored posts, no paid placement, no product line of our own.

It also means our interests and yours line up better than they would at a store. A retailer recommends what it stocks. We recommend whatever we think is right, including the cheap option, and including telling you not to buy anything at all when that is the answer. The full statement is on the affiliate disclosure page.

The site

94 pages across six categories, organized around the order a detailer actually works: wash, decontaminate, correct, protect, maintain. If you are starting from nothing, the starter kit guide is the page to read first — and the answer is not a polisher.

If a figure on any page looks wrong to you, tell us at contact@detailingandwax.com. We will check it against the manufacturer’s published data and either correct the page with a dated note or explain why it stands. That process is set out on our editorial policy.