Ceramic coating in Revesby

Coatings do not hide anything. They are transparent and they cure hard over the surface underneath, so swirled paint coated today is swirled paint you are looking at for the life of the product. Every suspiciously cheap coating we have seen skipped this stage, and it shows within a month.

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.

The panel wipe is easy to skip and expensive to have skipped. Polishing leaves oils on the surface, and a coating applied over them bonds to the oil, not the paint. That is the usual explanation when a coating fails in months while the same product on the next car goes for years.

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

Gtechniq Crystal Serum Ultra is the flagship and is never sold to the public, only released to installers Gtechniq has trained. Rated for up to nine years, with a harder outer layer over a softer base.

System X is applied through a certified network with the warranty registered in the owner’s name. Worth knowing it cannot be transferred if you sell, and annual inspections are required to keep it valid.

Ethos Graphene brings graphene behaviour: less water spotting and better heat dissipation across the panel.

Magnum is Australian-made, and we are an authorised detailer, which is what makes their seven year Obsidian S1+ and ten year Luminous X guarantees available.

Holding accreditation on all four means the recommendation follows the car rather than whatever we happen to have on the shelf.

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 used car is the one to be careful with. Coating over a panel that has been resprayed badly, or over a previous coating that is failing, locks in the problem.

So before anything is booked we read the paint depth on every panel. A panel far thicker than its neighbours has been resprayed. One far thinner has been corrected hard before. Both change what can safely be done, and both are worth knowing about the car you just paid for.

Once that is known the job is the same as any other: decontaminate, correct, coat. It is often a bigger correction than a new car needs, because the previous owner’s washing is in the clear coat.

A coating on a work vehicle is a different calculation. The tray and the bar take physical abuse that no coating resists, so the sensible spend is the cab and the bonnet, which take sun and road film and are what a buyer looks at.

On a 4WD that sees dirt roads, the coating makes the wash after a trip dramatically faster, because mud and road film release rather than bond. Whether that is worth the cost of correcting the paint first depends on how much of the paint is worth correcting.

We will look at the vehicle and say which panels justify it. Sometimes the answer is a durable sealant on the whole car and a coating on nothing, and we would rather say that than sell a coating that gets scratched off in a month.