Detailing questions for Nick and Clyde

[lemming]

1. Ceramic coating: is there some preferred way to prolong this layer? And it is empirically better than any of the polymers and sealant? I cannot tell if this is a quantum leap forward or just another trendy thing.

2. Paint correction: I am slowly understanding what this is. So when Nick buffed out a lot of the swirls on the 993TT, that means working polish into the swirls to fill the swirl lines —or— to cut into the clear coat a little to basically remove the swirls? My question is, if it’s polish that is filling the swirls, does the polish bond with the clear coat? Or wear away with time and then the swirls come back?

[clyde]

There are many ceramic coatings and many "ceramic coatings" in name that may technically qualify at a "we can legally call it a ceramic" level, but are short term rather than multi-year.

There are quite a few good ones made by different companies and there is also a lot of white label stuff going on where the same actual product is sold with different names in different packaging by many different companies. There is a range of application ease/difficulty, curing times, characteristics (gloss, hydrophobicness, resistance to atmospheric degradation, etc), availability, and pricing.

All of them benefit from maintenance with (usually quick and easy to apply "toppers" that help the coating perform to its fullest for the longest period of time. Some ceramics are intended to be used with specific toppers and there is mix and match.

There's only so much testing data out there and application quality, conditions the car is stored/driven in, and how well the coating is maintained factor into how long it will last and how well it will perform.

Is it a quantum leap forward? :dunno: A high quality, skilled application of a ceramic coating should make a car much easier to keep clean, shiny, and better protected from elements and casual handling for a number of years with much lower effort than most other options. A high quality ceramic does physically bond to the clear coat.

Fundamentally, paint correction removes a portion of clear coat. Polishing takes off barely any and a car with factory paint can withstand many, many polishes over the coarse of its life before all of the clear coat is removed. The problem with polishing only is that if the scratches or imperfections are deeper in the clear than the abrasive can get to, you can't really get it fully corrected. That's when you use a compound. Compound is more abrasive/aggressive than polish and takes off more clear coat. It cuts enough to take care of deeper scratches/swirls and the like. It also usually introduces light swirls or scratches of its own that often leaving a cloudy or hazy appearance. So, that gets followed up with polishing. The polish then takes off just enough to make the surface smooth again.

Compounding and polishing improves the physical surface of the clear coat. In turn, this leaves the surface in the best condition possible for a protectant of some kind...whether it's a ceramic "coating" or some kind of paint "sealant" (like Sonax PNS or Meguiar's Fast Finish, or many, many others).

Coatings and sealants basically perform the same function, but quality coatings should last a few years while coatings are usually only good a for a few months. Coatings take comparatively more time, care and effort to apply than sealants, but if you add the time you would have reapply a sealant over the lifetime of a coating, you'd be way ahead with the coating. You have to use some kind of abrasive to remove a coating before it wears out. Sealants can be removed with something as simple as washing with another product. Because coatings are so durable, it's really critical you paint correct and take care of any blemishes first because you can't do anything about it while the coating is on. You can apply a sealant over swirls, bug guts or whatever, and remove the sealant when you're ready to deal with it (of course, the bug guts, bird shit, and whatever else that exits will continue to damage the paint underneath, but it won't be any worse than if you didn't apply sealant over it). And so on...

Waxes fill in swirls and light scratches before quickly degrading and disappearing

[Nick M3]

Yes, clyde covered it. Compounding (what I did on the TT) is removing paint. You can only do it so much, which is why I don’t really love the crazy details where they take off half the clear coat of a car that’s in decent shape.