Bugs & insects

[efnfast]

Here`s a question I bet you`d never thought of (I know I hadn`t, lol) - let`s say you have a soft clear that`s dirty. You gently ripe your hand (or a cloth, or whatever) against it.... insant marring.



However, same situation, say a spider is walking across it. No micromarring. A bee lands on your hood, walks around, then flies off. No micromarring.



Why is that?:think2



Yes, slow day today :nervous:

[Flawbolt]

This is actually a difficult question to answer mainly due to the language `we` use in the detailing community.



Let`s define Hardness as the resistance of a material to permanent plastic deformation.



In layman’s terms this simply means…take a pointed hard object and push it vertically against a horizontal surface with a certain force and then measure the indentation that you make in the surface…’hard’ materials will have less indentation. Likewise, `soft` materials will have more indentation.



Now let`s move on to marring, swirls, etc. For simplicity I will treat swirls, marring, and scratches as the same thing. In many ways they are…but detailer’s often talk about them differently. The difference between them has to do with the density, number, appearance, and depth…marring is often described as very high density, shallow scratches over a large area. Swirls are similar but have a curved nature to them. Scratches are low density and deep.



Whether we are talking about marring, swirling, or scratching…the question is the same…why do clears, whether hard or soft, mar, swirl, and scratch easily. The answer: A scratch is caused by two components: a load and a shear. Scratch resistance, therefore, is different from hardness (hardness involves one component: loading).



Now to the answer of your question (sorry for the digression). In the process of gently wiping your hand across the dirty surface one causes a load and a shear...the hand presses on the dirt (which, by the way, is hard itself) and then slides it. The process where a spider walks across the surface or a bee lands on the hood is simply a load...and a very small load!!! It`s the shearing that causes the scratch along with the hardness of the `thing` doing the shearing.

[efnfast]

Interesting, I hadn`t thought of it that way (load & shear ... I mostly just think of just bolts in those terms) :think2