There are many paint protection products on the market and they bring their share of confusing terminology.
But they are worth your time and money if you understand what you’re buying.
Why use a protector at all?
The idea of a paint protector is that it turns your car into a giant non-stick frypan. It makes the cleaning process faster and easier, you get a great shine for much longer and it keeps your clear coat intact.
Under normal conditions, the clear coat - that layer on top of your colour - is slowly ground away. That’s a problem, because the clear coat contains most of the UV inhibitors that protect the colour coat underneath.
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You lose half of the paint’s UV protection every four to five years just due to sunlight exposure. So unless your car falls in the “garage only, look at me” category, you drive it, it gets dirty, you wash it and in doing so grind away some of that clear coat. And repeat.
The clear coat is only about 40 microns (the average thickness of a human hair is 70 microns), and the more you grind that away the more protection you lose. Fading of the colour coat starts and eventually you’re up for a repaint.
What product should you use?
Right now, the best thing you can have applied to your car is a “ceramic paint protector”, also known as “glass coating”. The terms ceramic or glass are used simply because these products contain elemental silica: a resin that can cross link (polymerise) and bond to the paint.
Proper ceramics are clear liquids only, no separating into layers or the like, and when applied properly will form a hard coating on top of the clear coat. They are best applied by a trained professional.
Beware of products described as “ceramic infused”. They give the impression that the silicon fluid containing product inside the bottle will form a long lasting coating. Often, these products are not water-clear products and that’s the best giveaway that you are not dealing with a resin-based product.
How hard is it?
The underlying paint provides the hardness, rather than the protector – which is only a few microns thickness, remember. Put the paint protector on a steel plate with 9H hardness and the product will test to a 9H performance. When that same product is applied to 4H hardness car paint, it will test to 4H performance.
You can apply more layers with some ceramics, which could result in a deeper gloss and an even easier-to-clean surface, but it still does not make any material difference to the hardness.
How long does it last?
The better products cannot be removed by the car owner unless you use a machine polisher, sandpaper or heavy cutting compound and a lot of elbow grease. This is where the problem comes in application by the untrained: any resin left to cure on the surface gets very difficult to remove.
But eventually the product should break down again into only silica (sand) and oxygen. But it depends on the individual product.
Can you scratch the coating?
Just about anything in this world can be scratched, so make sure you don’t have grit in your wash cloth or sponge/mitt.
The irony is that even if the base resin has an actual hardness of 9 on the Moh’s scale, when one makes the product “softer” it can be made into a “self healing” coating. That’s a dangerous term, but it indicates that minor scratches in the ceramic will repair themselves: the resin will cross link again and remove the scratch. But that’s only possible if the scratch mark is in the ceramic layer and not in the clear coat or base layers.
When it is too late to protect the paint?
If it gets to the point where you think the protection is peeling, it’s more likely to be the clear coat coming off the colour coat. Sadly, there’s nothing that can be done about it; Father Time takes over and nobody knows how to stop him.
The best thing one can do is look after the car in the best possible way while it’s still shiny and protected.
