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Detailing, a dark art? 🙊🤗

spongebob squarepants

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Joined
20 Dec 2009
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8,930
As the hours tick by till I finally collect Herman yellow, I've had the inevitable e mail re vehicle protection, in this case G techniq. There was also an accompanying video showing why it's imperative it's applied 'professionally" only :?:
basically there's then a video of a bloke with 2 cloths (wax on wax off stylee) which I thought was hilarious, and I'm sure my 12 year old stepdaughter could do with half an hrs coaching, and she loses concentration very easily :grin:
Having had a previous 911 detailed professionally and doing my last two vehicles with pretty incredible results myself at a fraction of the cost (The salesman at OPC Wilmslow said the finish on Herman white was the best he'd ever seen :grin:) is the dark art of detailing actually very easy and a bit of a scam?

My BM was done in a day, looked incredible, and beaded perfectly for months afterwards.



 
Its a bit like basic to intermediate car maintenance I guess. Some are happy to learn and do it themselves, others have no inclination or time to do so, and prefer to pay others to do it. I will happily spend 3 days in the garage detailing my car, but I would pay someone to paint inside my house.

I worry a bit more with the ceramic coatings, only because the 'professional' grade stuff has the capability to weld itself to your car's paint, and takes some serious work to remove.
 
I'm gagging to have a go at mine but the weather isn't playing ball so will probably leave until spring.

That BM looks Brill what process/products did you use?
 
Ask a paintshop how hard it is to remove the ceramic coating. Once it goes on, any imperfections will be trapped underneath it and will require a fair effort to remove the coating to rectify the imperfections.
 
Is detailing a dark art? Probably not but like most things in life, practice makes perfect and a professional detailer simply gets more time to perfect their technique than those of us who do it ourselves.

Before my health problems, I'd always looked after the detailing on my own cars for well over 30 years - had all the kit (Porter Cable polisher/various grades of polish, costly Zymol waxes etc) and actually enjoyed spending several days away from 'work', polishing it to a mirror HOWEVER if more than basic paint correction became necessary, I was always far happier to take it to a pro.

Even if I could do it now myself, I probably wouldn't - the combination of modern water-based paints and the new ceramic coatings would still encourage me to pay someone else.

My last two cars had machine correction, followed by full G-techniq CS Black, which has to be applied professionally, indoors and closely following the mfrs instructions, otherwise once bonded to the paint, the coating has to be sanded to remove it.

I paid about £700 (should have cost c£1k) to have the paint correction and treatments (including wheels, windows and interior) via Midlands Car Care and thought that was pretty good value, both to negate the effort and get 5 years paint protection.

Granted, it wasn't quite as rewarding as DIY polishing and topping up the wax every 3 months but it was a heck of a lot less effort, stayed cleaner and was much easier to look after.

PS: AFAIK G-techniq will only allow authorised and trained G-techniq agents to purchase and apply the professional CS Black product because of the specific requirements for its application, conditions etc - my regular detailer can't do it.
 
FZP said:
Ask a paintshop how hard it is to remove the ceramic coating. Once it goes on, any imperfections will be trapped underneath it and will require a fair effort to remove the coating to rectify the imperfections.

Frank I get that, but I always presumed the coating was professionally sprayed on under lab conditions etc, not just a bloke with a cloth ? Am I missing something?
 
:dont know: what I'd like to know is how a car with black paint looks after it's had the ceramic coating done. After a while does it mark up or does it stay pristine?
 
The treatments the dealers try and sell are a scam. I'd rather pay a professional detailer to do a new car detail before I collected it.

I've a foot in both camps. I'll detail any colour car apart from black. I just can't seem to get absolute perfection on black and then it's toys out the pram.

Having said that I paid a professional detailer £350 to perfect my freshly painted car the other month and I'm not that impressed. It will go to a different one in spring then PPF.

The Fiat dealers tried their best to sell us their miracle treatment when we bought my wife's Abarth. The salesmen even mentioned paying less in p/ex for vehicles that didn't have it. They do take punters for idiots don't they. :grin:
 
Marky911 said:
The treatments the dealers try and sell are a scam. I'd rather pay a professional detailer to do a new car detail before I collected it.

I've a foot in both camps. I'll detail any colour car apart from black. I just can't seem to get absolute perfection on black and then it's toys out the pram.

Having said that I paid a professional detailer £350 to perfect my freshly painted car the other month and I'm not that impressed. It will go to a different one in spring then PPF.

The Fiat dealers tried their best to sell us their miracle treatment when we bought my wife's Abarth. The salesmen even mentioned paying less in p/ex for vehicles that didn't have it. They do take punters for idiots don't they. :grin:

The dealers patter is hilarious. Let's be honest they are not going to carry out any correction first so presuming they actually really put anything on it they are just sealing in the swirls and scratches :eek: Black must be a nightmare!
 
Sponge my old mate, don;t take this the wrong way but your effort on the red BMW is just a clean :grin:

The second pic close up shows a lot of swirling :roll: ....... therefore physics dictates there is a lot of light diffraction, if that had been machine polished it would 'ping" with much less diffraction.

It's like anything, the cost of v reward is exponential. If you want a nice clean car do it yourself in a day or with patience and practice / the right products in a few days. I used to love detailing but if I wanted a professional job I would leave it to the professionals, it just takes too long to do.

The work is all in the prep and even more so with ceramic coatings. If your thinking of getting the yellow peril done than it will need a machine polish before ceramic coating, the ceramic coating is the easy bit. Nb the perceived benefit is always less with a light colored car as light diffraction is less apparent.

You have also got to realise that with ceramic coating, the stuff the pros use is not the same as the stuff you or I could buy ie its trade only and a better product but there is a bigger risk if not applied correctly, even if it does look easy to do.

Remember there is a world of difference between detailing and 'detailing" :wink:
 
With the right tools and materials it an easy and enjoyable job to do. I Machine polished my 997 last March and it still looks great. The trick is to (as we have done at work) club together and buy larger quantities of cleaners, polishes and seals. We actually have more car cleaning products in the office than design tools :?:
 
FZP said:
:dont know: what I'd like to know is how a car with black paint looks after it's had the ceramic coating done. After a while does it mark up or does it stay pristine?

Black is no less durable than any other colour, it's just that black tends to show marks more easily. The same holds true for black cars that have been finished in a ceramic coating.

Aside from offering better protection from chemical damage like bird lime and pollution than traditional waxes, ceramic coatings like CS provide greater resistance to mechanically induced marring like swirl marks however, whether swirls are created depends on what's scratching the surface.

It's like the fact that you can scratch a sapphire with a diamond but not the other way round, simply because one has a harder surface than the other.

If you or your valeter use a good wash technique, (jet wash/snow foam, mitt, two bucket etc), then I would say a ceramic coating will not only be easier to look after but will stay swirl free for much longer than a car without it, simply because by being harder than the original clear coat, it will take something equal to or harder than the ceramic coating to actually damage the finish. As a consequence, swirls/scratches that do arise tend to be fewer in number and are generally finer anyway.

Having had G techniq CS professionally applied to my last two cars, I wouldn't go back to the old days of doing the polishing myself and applying carnauba or acrylic sealant (rewarding as it was at the time). Gyeon's professional ceramic coating is also worth considering.
 
jonttt said:
Sponge my old mate, don;t take this the wrong way but your effort on the red BMW is just a clean :grin:

The second pic close up shows a lot of swirling :roll: ....... therefore physics dictates there is a lot of light diffraction, if that had been machine polished it would 'ping" with much less diffraction.

It's like anything, the cost of v reward is exponential. If you want a nice clean car do it yourself in a day or with patience and practice / the right products in a few days. I used to love detailing but if I wanted a professional job I would leave it to the professionals, it just takes too long to do.

The work is all in the prep and even more so with ceramic coatings. If your thinking of getting the yellow peril done than it will need a machine polish before ceramic coating, the ceramic coating is the easy bit. Nb the perceived benefit is always less with a light colored car as light diffraction is less apparent.

You have also got to realise that with ceramic coating, the stuff the pros use is not the same as the stuff you or I could buy ie its trade only and a better product but there is a bigger risk if not applied correctly, even if it does look easy to do.

Remember there is a world of difference between detailing and 'detailing" :wink:


I thought the close up on the bmw was a before and after shot, he just hasn't done it with a straight line??
 
jonttt said:
Sponge my old mate, don;t take this the wrong way but your effort on the red BMW is just a clean :grin:

The second pic close up shows a lot of swirling :roll: ....... therefore physics dictates there is a lot of light diffraction, if that had been machine polished it would 'ping" with much less diffraction.

It's like anything, the cost of v reward is exponential. If you want a nice clean car do it yourself in a day or with patience and practice / the right products in a few days. I used to love detailing but if I wanted a professional job I would leave it to the professionals, it just takes too long to do.

The work is all in the prep and even more so with ceramic coatings. If your thinking of getting the yellow peril done than it will need a machine polish before ceramic coating, the ceramic coating is the easy bit. Nb the perceived benefit is always less with a light colored car as light diffraction is less apparent.

You have also got to realise that with ceramic coating, the stuff the pros use is not the same as the stuff you or I could buy ie its trade only and a better product but there is a bigger risk if not applied correctly, even if it does look easy to do.

Remember there is a world of difference between detailing and 'detailing" :wink:

:hand: pic 2 (the non swirl part) is after just one sweep with heavy cut :thumb:

And this was the beading, still the same when bazil was (inevitably) sold on :grin: having had a 'professional" job done on my silver 997 previously I couldn't tell the difference (granted I'm partly blind)

:dont know:
 
For me detailing is an absolute racket and I have never seen a car that has been better than my efforts.....ever.
 

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