cptzippy said:
Has anybody taken it up to test the medium-long term effects of the various waterless washes now available. I'm thinking specifically of long term marring, cleaning effect, and interaction with LSP's. I'm guessing you'd need to start with a pretty good surface to start with (which I one of the things that would be daunting for me to try it).
What do you think a test of this would look like? Would you want to use a comparison of brands? What other considerations would there be?
I guess it'd depend on just how carefully controlled you wanted the test to be; some people here set the bar mighty high with regard to such stuff, won't lend any credence to tests that they think are "too subjective" (scare-quotes intentional in many cases). Heh heh, it's easy to say somebody else's test isn't sufficiently objective/controlled...much easier than coming up with a better test, and seeing it through, yourself
Yeah, you *would* need to start with a marring-free surface if you want to test for marring..only way to know what's "new" and thus presumably attributable to the change.
I'd just compare waterless/conventional the way I did ONR/conventional- I corrected the vehicle and applied a fairly durable LSP (845). I did many conventional washes without marring the finish or killing the LSP, satisfied myself that I had a "baseline wash technique" that didn't cause issues. Refreshed the LSP. Then I started washing one section of the vehicle with ONR and I kept an eye on how that section compared with the rest of the vehicle.
To compare different brands just wash part of the vehicle with one and another *similar* area with the other. Yeah..there will be some differences here and some people will say "bad, uncontrolled test!" and get all :nono about it. But if you pick panels that are similarly easy/difficult to wash, and that get a fairly equal amount of soiling/etc. then it should be close enough for you to see any significant differences between the different products.
And yeah..there's the learning curve issue; it will probably take a while to sort out your technique. That'd not only be a consideration in itself (how easy is the product to master) but will also be a wildcard in the comparison, so you might need to get the technique sorted out *before* doing the "final comparison test", which would sure make for a big, long, drawn-out test.
All a matter of how controlled you think the test needs to be before you'll accept it as valid :nixweiss
