Further to my above response, the attached photo is the best visual representation of why I have moved away from toppers and continually putting things on coatings.
I recently had a couple of weeks off from work so I popped down my buddy’s detailing unit to have a chat and got roped in to helping out for a week. I’m a sucker. Anyway, one of the cars I worked on was the one in the photo. It was looked after, in the sense that the owner liked to frequently use topper products on it when he did his own washes, and to help mask the swirls, always knowing he would be bringing in for a full correction and coating. He complained that over time though, the water behaviour and gloss just never got to the levels they were at when he first used the products and he thought they might have got weaker in the bottle over time.
I’m sure you’ve all come across this kind of ‘film’ on the paint of cars. This was after the strong wash and I was removing the tar from the vehicle. It is essentially layers and layers of QD’s/spray sealants on the paint. They are now so durable that by using them every wash, they never really wear off. Add to this, the car picks up bits of contamination from sap, hard water, bugs etc and this then gets trapped within the next layer of topper. Of course, each of these layers are sub micron thick, but once the contamination has been added and preserved, if it is not removed and gets topped and topped there gets to a point where you might be using the most hydrophobic product known to man, but if it’s added on top of this base (which is invisible until I sprayed tar remover on the car) it merely becomes average. The coating is more than clogged, and it’s clogged by more than contamination.
I’m seeing more and more of it, and it convinces me that the best thing to do is to keep the coating surface as functionally effective as possible by keeping it as clean as possible and leave it do what it was designed to do. Otherwise, you are essentially treating the coating like the clear coat and using toppers like we used to use waxes and sealants not that long ago.
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