It’s December now on the East Coast. Fun cars are going away. They’re going into storage units, garages, under tents and heavy tarps, because winter is coming. California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada . . . you don’t know what it’s like. You don’t know what it’s like to have Mother Nature test you like Toriel. And like that obscure video game reference I just made, the only way you can win is not to fight. Breakthrough paint protection will protect your investment for many, many years.
Don’t take your car out in winter in Pennsylvania. You will loose. Our air is never dry. The show is wet and heavy, not that Park City, Telluride fluffy-stuff that is oh-so whimsical. No, East Coast snow compacts into ice and goes right for your wheel well, where the metal is nice and weak.
Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, and most other Northeast transportation departments for that matter, pre-salt roads in anticipation for snow. Pre-salting the roads is exactly what it sounds like. Dump trucks, filled with the brownest salt available, scatter the aggregate sodium chloride out the back via a sideways spinning hamster wheel.
Salt eats clear coat and causes corrosion. Even worse, when municipalities run out of road salt, they switch to a cheaper alternative: coal ash. Great, how much more carbon can you get? How about the black byproduct of 1,000 coal stoves and power plants?
The result of all this abuse from Mother Nature is that Pennsylvanians and other East Coasters are at the sword’s-tip of fanatical car care. Oh sure, there’s your California carnauba waxes and your pinkie-out water-less waxes. That nonsense is amateur-hour. The real technology is 3M clear wraps or, ceramic applications. That’s why I went to Urban Werks’ open house just south of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
I was able to sit down with Neil Maser, the owner of Urban Werks Garage and lean the modern way to keep your east coast car looking like a west coast car.
“Better than clear wraps is ceramic over-coating. The product also comes in variations which allows the undercarriage to be treated as well as your paint work, glass, and trim. It’s a liquid that goes on in stages, in layers. I mean, you need work fast because once you start, you have eight hours before whatever you applied to a vehicle cures and hardens,” said Maser.
I’m guilty of over-waxing cars because I am terrified of that first unexpected snowfall. Ceramic coating is different, though. “Ceramic coating replaces waxing. It goes on top of your clear-coat. It is a covalent bond to your paint as opposed to a physical bond like wax,” said Maser. “Once ceramic is bonded, it is five times stronger than your clear-coat alone.”
Maser showed me a bottle of “Ceramic Pro,” the product he uses. It was a small brown bottle about the size of a hotel shampoo bottle, “This is good for, at the very least, one or two cars,” said Maser.
“Just that?” I asked.
“Yea,” more if you have a smaller car like your Honda Fit. “It goes on in thin layers. One of the tests you can do with ceramic coatings, I saw a guy do this—the lighter test. He took the hard plastic end of a cigarette lighter and start pegging his car with it. He looked like he was leaving these huge gouges in the paint. And, with a rag, he just wiped them off, it blends itself back together so nicely.”
“How you do you bond clear ceramic to a car’s paint?” I ask.
“First you have to get all of the existing wax off. A mild solvent will do that, you just spray the car down. Then you need to get the top layer of the paint as clean as you can, clay it down. Then, with microfiber applicators, apply the liquid ceramic over everything, wheels and trim. Then, after each coat, there’s a forty-five minute wait time between coats. Again, between the base coat and the top coat, you have an eight-hour window before it all cures. It’s a nightmare if you miss that window and you have to take a layer off for whatever reason. You have to move.”
I think for a moment and say: “Say you did it to my Honda Fit. I use that thing all the time, in all weather. I drove it to Denver, down to Tampa around around Pennsylvania in the slush. How long can I expect ceramic to stay on?”
“Two layers will last you five years with general maintenance, which means: wash your car regularly and inspect your coating yearly. The coating includes a base cost and a top coat, which are different,” said Maser.
“Even with the mess? Will it yellow like a clear wrap might?”
“Nope.”
“What is the price point?”
“It varies, based on how big your car is. I mean, A Ford-F250 is going to cost more to bake ceramic onto it than your Honda,” said Maser.
Maser gave me a tour of his shop, it is a 1960’s service station that still has the glass pump attendant booth out near where the gas pumps would have been. It’s storage now. Each bay is long and tall, enough to handle box trucks. “We use heat lamps in here to facilitate ceramic curing,” added Maser.
I left the Urban Werks’ open house thinking about 80’s cars—vehicles that lie between adored classics and modern vehicles that are still new. They’re out there, in yards or barns or half-finished in alleyways. The weather is pounding them and, often times, the builds are so budget that car-care or paint care isn’t part of the budget. What will become of them? What became of all the Ford Mavericks?
Ceramic coating is a good thing for any investment and I should be happy because it is going to keep the collector car market good for another ten years, especially for those with means to do it. I thought about Porches.
The good news is, because of the rotten East Coast weather, body and paint protection is advancing by the means of necessity.