Ceramic coating in Punchbowl

A coating is transparent and it cures over whatever is underneath it. Apply one to swirled paint and you have sealed those swirls in for the life of the coating, which on a good product is years. It is the most common and most expensive mistake in this industry, and it is why a cheap coating quote is usually cheap for a specific reason.

The order of work is fixed. Paint depth readings and an assessment. Iron and tar removers, then clay, to get the surface genuinely clean. Machine correction to remove the defects. A panel wipe on every surface to strip polishing oils. Then, and only then, the coating.

That panel wipe matters more than it sounds. Skip it and the coating bonds to polishing residue instead of to paint, which is why some coatings fail within months while the same product on the next car lasts years.

The coating is the last ten percent of the work and the smallest share of the time.

Both are silica chemistry. A graphene coating is the same base with graphene oxide added, which changes how the cured layer behaves rather than replacing the technology.

Graphene resists water spotting better and spreads heat across the panel instead of letting it concentrate. On a dark car parked outside through a Sydney summer, that is the difference you notice day to day.

Ceramic holds a small edge on outright gloss depth and has a longer real-world track record. On a garaged car kept for a decade, that counts.

The gap between the two is smaller than the gap between a well-prepared coating and a badly prepared one.

The condition of the paint, far more than the product on top. A coating takes hours. Correcting the paint underneath can take days, and two identical cars in the same colour can differ by a thousand dollars purely because one has been through automatic washes for five years.

Then size, then colour. Dark paint shows every swirl, so it needs more correction to reach the same visual standard, and it is the colour people most want corrected.

The coating tier is the smallest variable of the four, which is the opposite of how it is usually sold.

Coating is available mobile, and it is the job that needs the most planning of anything we do.

Correction is slow, so a two-stage job is not a couple of hours. The coating then needs time to cure before the car gets wet, which means the weather that week genuinely matters in a way it does not in the bay.

So when you book, tell us where the car will be parked, whether it is undercover, and whether you need it driveable in between. Shade helps enormously, because direct summer sun makes product flash off the panel before it can be worked.

Occasionally the honest answer is to wait for a better week or bring the car to Lakemba, and we will say so when we quote rather than after.

A coating behaves the same on any colour, but what you see is different. On black or dark grey the gloss and depth after correction are dramatic, and so is any swirl you leave behind, which is why dark cars need the most correction before coating.

On white and silver the coating shows itself in how the car washes rather than how it shines. Iron fallout and road film stop bonding, so the orange specks on a white bonnet stop appearing and the car stays looking clean for far longer between washes.

Either way, the coating goes on last. The colour changes how much correction sits in front of it, and that is what changes the quote.