I was very surprised at how well it cleaned off the old wax. Since many of my paint finishes are car wax, I usually use a carnauba based car wax. Regular "guitar polish" doesn't give a thick enough level of protection to expensive guitars. One of my colleagues suggested I try the GHS Guitar Gloss. It is the only other polish that feels like it has armor coating over the clear coat, besides car wax. A good thing about the guitar gloss is this, you can try it and deep clean your guitar's finish, and if you don't feel like it has done a good job, you can put a different wax right over the top of it, since it isn't a wax in itself. I used it on my own collection of high end Fender and Gibsons, before choosing to use it on a project guitar I was finishing up. It did an extremely good job on my older guitars. Then when I used it on a freshly wet sanded and polished new guitar, it looked like glass! I tried abrasion test on the paint, with no scratches. I bumped it around into a guitar stand a few times and then rapped a pair of pliers against the paint, also with no adverse reaction to the finish. It's important to understand, that I didn't strike the guitar body with a hammer, or anything extreme like that, but just hard enough to simulate the normal dings and dongs you get from simple regular wear and tear. I will be trying to find this stuff by the liter now!! I highly recommend this stuff!