Do you ceramic coat both sides of the wheel?
No, we do not. We only coat the face of the wheel, and we have good reason for doing this.
Our average customer is rather average, at least when it comes to cars. They generally don't take their cars to car shows, they will not try to keep in concours condition. They are not detailing enthusiasts, and they are unlikely to be paying a professional detailer to keep their car in pristine condition, going to the extent where they take the wheels off when cleaning the car to get to the backs.
Even our many customers with Aston-Martins, Maserati and Porsches are not going to these lengths and just want to protect their car, so it looks newer for longer and is easier to maintain.
In such cases, even with a ceramic coating, the back of the wheel is hard to clean and is unlikely to ever be maintained to the point where it is kept like new. Unless you are very diligent and frequently clean this area, black brake dust will collect there.
With this in mind, it is better this area of the rim which can be seen through the spokes in the wheel is allowed to go black. In fact, for some of our customers who are concerned about this area, we have recommended that they take the car to our wheel company and paint this area black so any brake dust on it won't show.
Likewise, we don't coat brake calipers unless the customer requests it. It is something we can and have done, we have even arranged for calipers to be repainted in custom colours. But it is not something that the vast majority of our customers are concerned about.
Back to the subject of wheels, there is also a trade-off here. If in a number of years, you want to sell your car, or even give it a make-over because you want to keep it for another few years, by this point your wheels may look a little tired (no pun intended). The chances that you haven't scuffed the rims or picked up some corrosion is fairly small. The cost of wheel refurbishment has come down in recent years, so you have to consider that against the cost in time and effort of getting back there with a wheel brush every couple of weeks and scrubbing your wheels backs to make sure they remain shiny and silver.
And thus, our recommendation is, that if this is an area of the car you are concerned about, have them painted matte black, so the brake dust doesn't show, rather than ceramic coating them and going to huge effort to try to keep them clean.
Written by Danny Argent. Last updated 07/02/2023 15:29