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.
I used to be a bit of a topper wh*re as you know - but as great as the buzz I got from topping the car, I have moved away for it for multiple reasons:
- As you say it is fundamentally counter productive to repeatedly apply any semi-durable and semi-chemical resistant product without full (road film, iron, tar, limescale) decontamination. I ran a test some months ago to confirm this - a freshly applied topper product applied to half a panel stopped an iron remover from reacting to iron on that side. It`s a test that is easy to do and something I would recommend to anyone who has access to a badly contaminated test panel. As I have posted elsewhere, I have really struggled to find a topper which itself will provide 3 months of top top performance between my quarterly decon washes.. if I had, I`d likely still use it quarterly over a coating. Instead, my preference has been to apply a lite-coating as and when required (this could be once every 9-10 months).
- Further to that, Loach did some fantastic gloss measurement comparisons and in nearly every case that I can recall a second layer of an LSP reduced the measurable `gloss`, and that`s on decontaminated, polished paint. I can only imagine that sandwiching in contamination between the layers and clogging the pores of the coating will have further worse results. All these buzz words of `depth, flake pop, wet look` are what toppers promise and what makes them `great`... but it`s crazily subjective and in my view one big placebo effect.. A jetting effect does exist, I don`t know if anyone else saw Kamikaze showing 50/50s of the jetting (or darkening effect) of the new Overcoat 4.0 - it is impressive, though they seem to have missed that the other half of the panel had significantly more clarity. Is `jetting` really all that when it`s undoing the hard work of paint correction?!
- Toppers `fail` in different ways, many in a way that compromise the self cleaning and hydrophobic properties of the underlying coating... e.g. CarPro Reload which after 3-4 weeks would make even 4 week old CQuartz sheet water -- the sheer number of these posts on Facebook detailing groups is crazy. The response to this is often re-topping which only makes the problem worse and reoccur faster. The solution is of course that the failed Reload should be chemically removed then the bottle forever binned.
- In the case of pretty much every topper I have tried (20+) none have lasted anywhere near as long as they have when applied standalone to unpolished, bare paint. It is often extremely difficult to determine what is the coating vs what is the topper (another downside in itself!) but I just do not believe they can adhere to the surface, in fact I have seen a couple of manufacturers recently halve their durability claims when a product is being used as a top layer to a coating.
- The process of applying `most` toppers involves touching the paint, and due to imperfect conditions and equipment touching the paint can induce marring and scratches on medium to soft paint, even with perfect technique. When you have perfectly polished paint that you have agonised over, when you avoid quicker towel drying in favour of more time consuming use of a blower or a DI vessel, it feels counter productive to then smear an LSP over dry paint with a product dampened microfibre to then buff the largely dry residue with a dry microfibre.
The benefits are clear, they provide an element of short term `protection` to the underlying coating from water spots etc., they are often more hydrophobic than the underlying coating, they are in most cases slicker and provide a short term gloss boost. As much as I`ve searched, I can`t find one that fits my decon routine and offers everything that I am looking for. That`s pretty much the main reason why I`ve opted for CarPro SiC (which is one of the most rounded consumer coatings available) on my car.. there is no topper which can `improve` any of it`s characteristics, however they may prolong it`s life. I`ll continue to experiment with toppers on the wife`s car where the stakes are lower
This has been a subject I have spent a tonne of time and money researching for myself, on my own as well as many other cars I detail and maintain and the results are extremely consistent. YMMV
h34r:!!) The point I was trying to raise is that many people don`t go to the trouble of doing good maintenance washes before topping their cars. The typical logic is - Oh, my water behaviour is going a bit flat, I best add a topper. This doesn`t take into account WHY it is going flat. If the coating is decently hydrophobic and 3 months old, it shouldn`t be going flat so there is something else at play and topping it will not be the best solution. However, this is what people do and they add another layer of something (like SnS/C2v3/Polish Angel Destillierte Einhorn Tranen) over the thing causing the beading to become flat gaining a temporary boost, but encapsulating it within that typically durable layer of sealant. They will do this fairly frequently as well, maybe every month, thinking it is the thing to do.
