Know what you are putting on your vehicle.

We find it quite amusing that their is so many different coating companies on the market and all of them are boasting the same spiel; 10H hardness, Lifetime durability, Super Hydrophobic, Self Cleaning.... The list goes on.

Its hard to pick between the different coatings, what product is legitimate or is just some garbage solvent based coating that you wouldn't want to coat your grandmothers garbage bin with.

We would like to debunk a few myths that will make you see through the smoke and mirrors and what they really are capable of.

10H:

Hardness rating, this is constantly being shown to you in different ads and the harder the rating the better you think it is. You couldn't be further from the truth. Hardness is primarily based on the substrate, meaning that if you are coating a 10h coating onto a 4h surface, the nano particles in the coating will bond to the surface not necessarily increasing the surface by 10h hardness. Its like putting the coating over a water balloon. You may have a semi-hard outer layer but the balloon is still going to pop when you introduce a sharp pencil to the surface. Most of these 10h tests you see are tested on having the coating on a 10h hard piece of steel. Therefore the hardness reading will of course read 10h. Also what we have found is that these 10h coatings are extremely hard to put on, they have very quick flash times and they are made primarily of solvent based chemicals meaning the physical layer of glass adhering to the surface is minimal compared to a more pure ceramic coating(more on this further down the post). Now lastly for these hard coatings is the water spotting issue. Have you ever seen how glass water spots? Well extremely hard coatings will actually bead up quite nice, but when the water droplet dries in the sun it emulsifies and dries a hard etched water spot which only light buffing can remove... What is the point of having a coating that still needs buffing every few months? You might as well wax, its a lot less headache.

Lifetime durability:

Now I know ALOT of the detailers in the industry like to believe that this is true and depending how you word it and look at the warranty details it technically can be true. Now when they say "lifetime" they mean that this coating is going to be attached during the lifespan of your vehicle. Meaning it will physically stay on the surface, same as your paint and your clear coat will, unless physically scraped off. But to just have a coating that will stay on the vehicle for life doesn't mean its going to perform like the first 6 months when you first had it applied. It also doesn't mean that it is going to stay looking in great shape, repel water, be scratch resistance and protect the paint. Now also most of these coatings have not been around in the market for longer than a decade, so please tell me how they can predict what the coating will do over a lifetime, further more why you should believe or would want to believe such a claim? Next is, your car or surface will experience variable amounts of wear over the years, scratches, bird droppings, acid rain, salt, rocks and UV damage. These will all effect any coating you have. Now do you really want to hold on to your lifetime coating and be riding around on a scratched weathered coating for 15 years, looking dull and faded just to stand true to your lifetime coating? Or do you want a rebuff and re-shine every few years to enhance the overall appearance, the look and the hydrophobics and be looking brand new again, without a costly removal and reapplication charge. At Glossbaus we do not offer lifetime protection on one application, but we do offer an outstanding coating that can be rebuffed and reapplied with ease, it is multi-layerable and made to stand the normal wear and tear of yearly usage.

Superhydrophobic / Self Cleaning:

Now these are all properties of a quality ceramic coatings. Some will be more "beady" and some will be more "sheety" depending on the different coatings and how they wear over time. Now many coatings can achieve the super hydrophobic look but without a proper maintenance top coat this beading effect will slowly diminish, the quicker it diminishes the more likely the coating wasn't put on correctly or is made of cheap quality chemicals. You can enhance your coating and rejuvenate it with our Sio2 Skin top coat, this gives unbeatable shine and ultra hydrophobic beading. If you have a ceramic coating from another company that claimed lifetime and has gone dead, but you cant afford to have it professionally removed and a new one re-installed you can use the sio2 skin to bring the coating back to life and keep it staying protected.

Now onto the good part;

As the old saying says "the proof is in the pudding" and in our case it is in coating. We have taken the liberty of putting a handful of coatings into different clear vials to test and see how they look after two weeks of curing, the results are more than interesting.

What we did was we put the coatings in the vials with the same amount of volume in each. As they begin gas'd off you could see what was physically left of the volume of ceramic "glass" "sio2" in the vial. Many of them disappeared by almost 3/4 of the original size. Meaning that a majority of their ingredients are solvent based and they are evaporating in the air. Meaning your getting more filler than coating.

Now some of them didn't even quite harden fully, and the actual coating that did harden as you can see was extremely opaque and not crystal clear. These coatings were the ones you see boasting 10h hardness. When you see these coatings after a few months looking so dull and cloudy, imagine over a few years of time in the hot sun.

One of the leading coatings we thought was going to perform well actually turned a deep yellow colour when fully cured. It also lost a lot of its size meaning it was primarily solvent based. Although it did fully harden unlike some of the other coatings, it still went yellow in colour. These yellow coatings will go yellow on your vehicle or surface overtime.

Now we don't want to "toot our own horns" but we did the same exact test with our coating and you can see that it is fully intact, crystal clear and hard as glass. This actually had only taken 3 days to fully cure where as the rest had taken nearly two weeks. Our coating did not lose a lot of its size when it cured, it did not shrink or gas off a majority of its mass, it stayed about 85% from what it originally was when we poured it in.

Now given these examples and pictures I hope this helps you on your own pursuit to finding a coating solution. As we said there is library of options, but testing is imperative to your brand, your reputation and your vehicles.

Try this test with your current ceramic coating you use and if you can, put ours to the test as well, we would love to see and hear about your results!