HD Bond – What Causes Ceramic Coating Failure?
Ceramic coatings have been on the market for some time now. For over 12 years, ceramic coatings have been receiving a ton of attention, and rightfully so, for being highly durable, super long lasting, very strong layers of protection for your vehicles. Far superior in almost every way to waxes and sealants, ceramic coatings provide an amazing peace of mind when it comes to long-term protection for your vehicle. In fact, do a google search for ceramic coating benefits and you’ll get page after page after page or the whys, hows, and awesomes surrounding ceramic coatings. Everyone selling coatings will tell you how awesome they are. What they won’t tell you, or at least what they won’t tell you so clearly is, what causes ceramic coatings to fail?
Automated Car Washes – The Devil of the Automotive Industry?
You can’t escape this one. No matter how hard we try. Inevitably, if you are researching ceramic coatings, you are going to see people discussing ceramic coating care, proper maintenance, and yep. Automated car washes. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a professional detailer recommend automated car washes. They cause damage to your vehicle’s exterior surfaces. Heavy alkaline detergents, hard fast spinning brushes, heavy mechanical tracks and arms, pieces that can break, no built-in intelligence guiding it around the more delicate parts of your vehicle. Touchless washes are certainly a far more benign and gentler alternative, but they often don’t do as good a job removing the dirt and contaminants from your vehicle’s surfaces. They also turn up the heat in terms of the detergents, often using even higher alkaline cleaners which leads to fading, chemical buildup, etching, hazing, etc.
So…the question inevitably comes up, do automated car washes ruin ceramic coatings? And the answer is, kind of.
Two of the biggest factors to a coating’s lifespan are chemical exposure and abrasion. The automated car washes, while sold as a beneficial service for your vehicle, are actually tunnels with concentrated amounts of harmful chemicals (alkaline “cleaners”) and abrasion (hard spinning brushes). All things being equal, an automated car wash is likely to diminish your ceramic coating faster than if you were to hand wash the vehicle. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to cause it to fail like right now, here today. The fact is, I have many clients who use automated car washes. Their coatings hold up great, they do require more maintenance from my shop to keep the coating performing, and they are perfectly ok with having the coating done again a little sooner if it fails sooner as a result of using an automated car wash.
Poor Installation/Bad Products
This is by far the most common cause for coating failure and it’s also the hardest issue for you, the client, to identify. Every single shop out there is going to tell you how awesome they are and how awesome the products they use are. Chances are, they have no idea who makes the formula or what’s actually even in the bottle. They fall for the same marketing you fall for, they install a few, they like the results, they need formula to sell, so they buy it. They sell it. They tell you how awesome it is. That’s it. That’s how it works.
90% of the ceramic coating formulas on the market are identical formulas. And they’re not good. They are cheap, solvent-heavy formulas that are difficult to install, they’re bad for the installer, bad for the environment, and they tend to fail very quickly because of how hard they are to install, a lot of shops cut corners. They install thin. It wears off faster, fails faster.
Most detailers I’ve trained, have had to be taught how to ensure an even coat is being laid down. It’s not easy. These are hand-applied formulas, the installation is naturally going to create a thinner area as the applicators run low on formula. This issue gets even more compounded with single-layer coating systems. With a multi-layer system, the additional coats will cover or hide or otherwise fill in for the thinner initial layer. It’s not compensating for it, you’re still getting a weak spot, but it’s better than a single layer being thin. This introduces weak spots throughout the installation. When one weak spot gives, the rest of the panel gives out shortly thereafter.
A lot of these formulas also use cheap, low-quality solids in their formulas. Further compounding the above issues. Not only do we have a thin, weak spot. Now we have a thin weak spot with a cheap low-quality formula. The failure snowballs and cascades into an even quicker failure. You’re not safe from this using the big brand names either. Their formulas are the formulas we’re talking about here. They aren’t good. What they are good at is marketing and sales. We don’t play that game. We use only coatings from IGL Coatings, which only utilize the highest quality quartz and graphene composites in their formulations, and we only use IGL Coatings on top of our HD Bond application layers. No other coating system will do. Trust us, we’ve tried them.
How Does HD Bond Prevent This?
This is a holistic answer. There are direct and indirect benefits. Indirectly, from a common sense standpoint, a shop that cares this much and puts this much effort into ensuring their coatings are built better, is far more likely to ensure their installation is as good as it can be. I think that kind of needs to be said, but directly, chemically speaking, no marketing, no buzzwords, no made-up opinions. Our process is better, simply because it is. To use the single-layer ceramic coating installation as an example; our 3 year coating is a single-layer ceramic coating formula from IGL Coatings. However, because of how we do our ceramic coatings, we are installing a thick, dense, initial ceramic-based foundation, our HD Bond Coat before we apply the ceramic coating formula. By definition, we can’t get thin spots. We eliminate the issue altogether by increasing the amount of raw material we use and by putting more time, energy, and focus into your vehicle. We are literally creating a gradient density in your vehicle’s ceramic coating, one that is flexible and dense at the bonding point, and hard and rigid on the outer, environment-facing surface.
As for poor installation? That’s simply not in our bag. We teach, train, and develop installation techniques. And while we’re all human and mistakes can happen, apples to apples, dollars to donuts, we are literally setting the standard for vehicle decontamination, prep, and ceramic coating application.