Cleaning Car Paint

I live in the mountains. There are trees in the mountains. There was gold here, but there's still plenty of iron. There's so much iron that tree roots carry the iron into their bark and leaves and even sap. On a hot day, sap sprays in a fine mist out of the trees thanks to evapotranspiration. This mist of red iron impregnated sap drifts down in the breeze to fall on objects below. The concrete is stained red by the sap, worse when a wet leaf is allowed to settle onto the pavement. What looks neat to a passerby is actually obnoxious to the person whose job it is to remove, such as the homeowner or broom operator. In this case, me. The sap also falls on other objects. In this case, my beautiful shining white Honda. It gets freckles on the paint when the sap lands. For years I've struggled with removing iron ore stains. Redwood tree sap does this too, in case you wondered.

I've tried washing it off with soap. Nope. Not entirely water soluble except in heavy sustained rains. Any traces left leak out into spreading blood stains. Looks horrible. Paint polish removes that, along with some of the paint. And requires a lot of elbow grease. I recently discovered that a polishing rag with a bit of compound in it, damp with water, works best at removing the sap, especially if its had hours to be damp, such as in the morning dew. I managed to remove the sap from my car this morning after a couple hours of effort instead of the usual 2-3 days by straight hand polishing. With this much effort invested, you can imagine I prefer not to do this very often. I think the last time I did this, there was a sudden and vicious blizzard afterwards which made the state news. The wax helped the inches of snow slide off so I could see. Alas, my tires were useless in the snow and left me repeatedly stuck. I was rescued half a dozen times by passerby and other motorists trapped behind me. This town is better than it thinks it is when it really matters.

I am now waiting for the temperature to warm up enough that the wax will actually stick to the paint so I can finish the job. With any luck, my efforts will result in rain, as that's what normally happens when I wash the car. As this is a desert in the summer, you can imagine its pretty surprising for that to happen out of the blue, but the Pacific ocean is only 5 hours away by passing cloud so things can surge from there to here with shockingly little warning.