What can be coated

A coating needs a hard, stable, non-porous surface to bond to. That single requirement answers most of what gets asked here, including the answers people find surprising, and it is worth understanding before reading any of the individual articles.

Painted panels are the obvious case. Beyond that, glass takes a coating extremely well and is arguably the surface where the benefit is most obvious day to day, because rain clears at speed without the wipers. Alloy wheels are the other strong case: they collect hot, corrosive brake dust, and a coated wheel releases it with a rinse instead of a scrub. Chrome and polished metal work. Hard plastic trim works, though faded trim wants restoring first, because a coating locks in whatever state the surface is in.

The surfaces that do not work fail for one of two reasons.

Porous or flexible materials give the coating nothing to bond to. Convertible fabric is the clearest example, and it is why soft tops take a fabric-specific waterproofing treatment rather than a ceramic coating; the two products do different jobs and are not interchangeable. Untreated wood behaves the same way.

Heat destroys the cure. Exhaust manifolds and brake components run at temperatures far beyond what a consumer coating tolerates. There are genuine high-temperature ceramic products for those parts, but they are a different chemistry applied by a different process, and a bottle intended for paintwork will simply burn off.

Vehicle type matters less than people expect. A motorbike, a caravan, a classic car and a commercial van are all just collections of the surfaces above, so the question is rarely "can this vehicle be coated" and almost always "which parts of it, and is the paint sound enough to be worth it". On a classic in particular, original or aged paint may be too thin to correct first, and coating an uncorrected finish seals the defects in.

Authored by Danny Argent. Reviewed by Gary Wray. (id=700)