How to Apply Ceramic Coating
If you have a car with a fresh, perfect coat of paint, how long do you think that finish will look like new? Without intervention on your part, your finish will start to show signs of wear and sun damage as soon as a few months after you purchase or paint it. The traditional solution for this is to wax your car and keep it waxed. Ceramic coatings are a new product that acts a bit like wax on steroids.
Ceramic coating acts very much like the old-fashioned wax we are all familiar with, but it incorporates nano-sized ceramic particles that bond with your car’s finish. These particles of ceramic are invisible once applied, but they provide an extremely strong shell for your car that will protect it from all manner of damage, including UV, mud, rain, and road salts.
Apply Ceramic Coating Like Wax
Ceramic coating is applied via an almost identical process to old-fashioned waxes. Start with a completely clean and dry vehicle. The cleaning process must remove any old wax residue before you go forward, so you may need to use a cleaning wax, or specially formulated car wash soap.
Once you have removed all of the residues of old waxings you can towel dry the vehicle and get ready to wax it. The biggest difference in ceramic coating is that it needs to be applied by hand. You should avoid applying with a buffer and applicator pad. Ceramic coating needs time to bond with the finish of your car. The more time you spend buffing it in before buffing off, the stronger the finish will be.
Ceramic Coating Lasts. And LASTS
Traditional wax should be reapplied at least once a month. If you park your daily driver outside, it might need to be reapplied more often than that. Considering that applying any wax requires removing the old wax, this is a tedious process to repeat every week or two. If you are wanting to protect your premium finish, it will be necessary, since wax rubs off due to normal road wear, and washing it will take it off, if not thoroughly. Once the wax starts coming off, it needs to be replaced.
Ceramic coating lasts much longer than traditional wax. If ceramic coating is properly applied, it can be washed without damaging the coating. Since one of the main drawbacks to traditional wax finishes is that you can’t apply soap without damaging the wax, this means that ceramic coatings allow you to address road grime, and contaminants like road salt in the winter, without having to make time for waxing as well. These contaminants are among the most damaging elements to your car’s finish, so you want to get them off of your car as soon as possible, but you don’t want to open your car up to further damage by washing them away before you can reapply your wax.
All of this means that a single application of ceramic coating can last three to six times as long as traditional wax finishes. Where you would reapply wax every few weeks, you can go 60-90 days with most ceramic coatings. This makes the lengthy application much less time-consuming when you consider you would only do it four to six times a year.
Ceramic coating is substantially more expensive than traditional wax but, to a degree, you get what you pay for. Ceramic coating is a premium finish protectant. When you consider the cost of repainting your car, the cost becomes negligible. By investing in a ceramic coating for your vehicle, you are investing in the look of your car for years to come!