Sealant comparison

[RippyD]

Update for the week. Let's start with the Boxster hood first. I washed the hood with Reset, rinsed, and dried.

Are these working? The hood is sloped steeply so I would expect them to clear faster than a car with with a flat hood. This is a great example of why absolute times aren't very meaningful - it's all about relative times on the same panel. How water is applied, slope of the panel, and apparently if the panel was dried are all factors. Water softness is likely a factor as well. So I decided to remove some product. I polished a section in the middle with McKee's Prep Polish using a black LC pad (no cut). I did 3-4 passes with a GG6 at speed 4 moving the machine slowly.


Here was the result. I don't see any significant difference. So either the prep polish didn't do anything, or the sealants aren't doing anything. (FYI, I polished that area again with a white pad just to be sure. No difference.) Hydro Blue in the middle is doing something at front, but not much. I'll call these done and give a few more days to Hydro Blue.

The Rover hood is doing about the same. Also washed it with Reset and dried. Here's the right side. Nothing much happens until 0:25. Left side is more interesting. SFX-4 clearing first as usual and slowing down. BF Carnuba, 303 working, 4 Star, and MdKee's fast wax still working (surprisingly). I'm calling calling Dodo Mystery #4 done. And I have to bring back Griots finishing. It's a little behind, but still clearing in ~45 seconds.

The Sentra trunk is doing well. I can't tell if it's clearing fast because it's small or if everything is working. I'll have to remove some product later today. So TBD on these. Same story for the Sentra hood. All clearing in 30 seconds or so but there's little differentiation. Could be they're all done. Will update later today.

The Sentra roof has some working, some not. Sonax Briliant Shine still appears to be the fastest. Megs Quik Wax, WG DGS, and Ultima Acrylic and McKee's 10 Min are working. Crystal Seal is very much done.

I'll get an updated graph pic and a link out later today, as well as an update on the Sentra hood and trunk.

[RippyD]

Long winded post. Most the stuff below the graph can be skipped. If you have questions about the cost graph they are likely answered below in garrulous rambling.

Two updates from yesterday: I polished an area across the hood. The only difference I saw was that the polished area may have cleared water a little sooner than the other areas. So clearly the sealants had stopped working. I did the same for the trunk and also could not see any difference. I'm calling the products on the hood done, which would be consistent with what happened on the Boxster hood for two of them. I'm going to throw out the tests on the Sentra trunk. I hate to do this, but that area is just too small to get a good sense of sheeting action. Will get those three reapplied this week.

Here's an updated graph of results. Here is a link to the spreadsheet.


If you have no interest in the spreadsheet you can skip the rest of this post.

I put some notes at the top of most tabs in the spreadsheet. I'm not expecting most of you to get how it works-it's a little overly complicated. The goal is to get it automated so as I enter tests the graphs change automatically. All working, except it's bad visually for the 2nd graph so I'm doing that manually for now. 2nd graph, you ask?

I've been trying to collect some usage info on these sealants. What does it cost to use them and apply them? First of all, how do you value your time? I put an hourly rate at the top of the tab called named "Usage info." You can save a copy and put in whatever rate you want, including 0. I suspect this is more useful to pros that than to people like me. I'm also estimating time to apply for a small sedan. A wipe-on-wipe-off obviously takes less time than an AIO. I guessed at the times based on my experience. Again, you can easily change these if you like. I also did some time testing: I applied a few of these and timed myself just to see if my estimates were ok. Where I have actual times, I used those.

Lastly, I'm trying to get a product cost per usage for a small sedan sized car. This will let us know what the true cost of the product is. When you divide that cost by duration, you can get a cost per week, month, year, or whatever. If a product lasts for 2 weeks and it takes $1 of product to apply to a car, it would cost you $26 in product cost to keep your car sheeting all year. If it lasts for 26 weeks and takes $0.50 of product, it would cost $1 per year in product. Do you guys see where this is going?

I'm testing product amount on some panels of the Rover. I measured them and compared to the Sentra size, so I know the percentage. So if I do 3 panels of the Rover and this is 33% of the area of the Sentra, I can just multiply by 3 to know about how much product I would use on the Sentra. Why do it this way? Because the Sentra has product on it and I wanted some large areas to see how much product would get used. Going forward I may just apply to the Sentra. I weighted the product, applied it to the Rover, and weighed it again. Hope this also makes sense.

With all that, here is a what the cost graph looks like.


The line shows the product cost per application for a small sedan. The scale is on the right of the chart. The first bar shows the annual cost if you used the product for a year and reapplied it based on the longevity numbers. The other bar shows the cost if you included labor. I used $60 per hour - you can use whatever number you like. The scale for the bars is on the left of the chart. The numbers you see correspond to the Annul Cost bar. It's too low to see for some of these.

So what does this thing say? Let's look Annual cost bar. Track Claw says $1. That means it's ~$1 of product to cover a small sedan with this stuff. Collinite and FK 1000 say $0. Rounding issue. Based on weight, Collinite used $0.15 of product and FK 1000 used $0.08 per application. They both last about 6 months. So at 2x per year their cost is still under $0.50.

Why is DG 105 so expensive? The product costs almost nothing. It's an AIO, so the labor gets expensive. It's an hour+ to do a small car vs. 10 mins for most of these. Why is BF Polymer Spray so expensive? Because it doesn't last. While it takes no time to apply, you would be applying it every week to keep sheeting water.

The blue like is showing product cost per application. You can see that most are very inexpensive. A few are not. Note that I almost certainly overuse the spray products. The one exception is Polish Angel. I tried hard to use it as sparingly as possible knowing it's expensive and that it doesn't take much. For most of the other sprays I probably used 1.5-2x what I needed to.

[Cruzscarwash]

Long winded post. Most the stuff below the graph can be skipped. If you have questions about the cost graph they are likely answered below in garrulous rambling.

Two updates from yesterday: I polished an area across the hood. The only difference I saw was that the polished area may have cleared water a little sooner than the other areas. So clearly the sealants had stopped working. I did the same for the trunk and also could not see any difference. I'm calling the products on the hood done, which would be consistent with what happened on the Boxster hood for two of them. I'm going to throw out the tests on the Sentra trunk. I hate to do this, but that area is just too small to get a good sense of sheeting action. Will get those three reapplied this week.

Here's an updated graph of results. Here is a link to the spreadsheet.


If you have no interest in the spreadsheet you can skip the rest of this post.

I put some notes at the top of most tabs in the spreadsheet. I'm not expecting most of you to get how it works-it's a little overly complicated. The goal is to get it automated so as I enter tests the graphs change automatically. All working, except it's bad visually for the 2nd graph so I'm doing that manually for now. 2nd graph, you ask?

I've been trying to collect some usage info on these sealants. What does it cost to use them and apply them? First of all, how do you value your time? I put an hourly rate at the top of the tab called named "Usage info." You can save a copy and put in whatever rate you want, including 0. I suspect this is more useful to pros that than to people like me. I'm also estimating time to apply for a small sedan. A wipe-on-wipe-off obviously takes less time than an AIO. I guessed at the times based on my experience. Again, you can easily change these if you like. I also did some time testing: I applied a few of these and timed myself just to see if my estimates were ok. Where I have actual times, I used those.

Lastly, I'm trying to get a product cost per usage for a small sedan sized car. This will let us know what the true cost of the product is. When you divide that cost by duration, you can get a cost per week, month, year, or whatever. If a product lasts for 2 weeks and it takes $1 of product to apply to a car, it would cost you $26 in product cost to keep your car sheeting all year. If it lasts for 26 weeks and takes $0.50 of product, it would cost $1 per year in product. Do you guys see where this is going?

I'm testing product amount on some panels of the Rover. I measured them and compared to the Sentra size, so I know the percentage. So if I do 3 panels of the Rover and this is 33% of the area of the Sentra, I can just multiply by 3 to know about how much product I would use on the Sentra. Why do it this way? Because the Sentra has product on it and I wanted some large areas to see how much product would get used. Going forward I may just apply to the Sentra. I weighted the product, applied it to the Rover, and weighed it again. Hope this also makes sense.

With all that, here is a what the cost graph looks like.


The line shows the product cost per application for a small sedan. The scale is on the right of the chart. The first bar shows the annual cost if you used the product for a year and reapplied it based on the longevity numbers. The other bar shows the cost if you included labor. I used $60 per hour - you can use whatever number you like. The scale for the bars is on the left of the chart. The numbers you see correspond to the Annul Cost bar. It's too low to see for some of these.

So what does this thing say? Let's look Annual cost bar. Track Claw says $1. That means it's ~$1 of product to cover a small sedan with this stuff. Collinite and FK 1000 say $0. Rounding issue. Based on weight, Collinite used $0.15 of product and FK 1000 used $0.08 per application. They both last about 6 months. So at 2x per year their cost is still under $0.50.

Why is DG 105 so expensive? The product costs almost nothing. It's an AIO, so the labor gets expensive. It's an hour+ to do a small car vs. 10 mins for most of these. Why is BF Polymer Spray so expensive? Because it doesn't last. While it takes no time to apply, you would be applying it every week to keep sheeting water.

The blue like is showing product cost per application. You can see that most are very inexpensive. A few are not. Note that I almost certainly overuse the spray products. The one exception is Polish Angel. I tried hard to use it as sparingly as possible knowing it's expensive and that it doesn't take much. For most of the other sprays I probably used 1.5-2x what I needed to.

on the sealant info tab, id like to see if you can add the duration that the sealant lasted, this is great info and i cannot thank you enough for all this data, im a data miner so this for me is gold!!!! being able to sort thorugh the list and filter out the type of sealant i want to use, its est cost and then how long its been shown to last is AMAZING!!!

[RippyD]

Will do. For now, the duration in weeks is on the "Graph data" tab. (Have go through a few steps to get data graphed in Google Sheets. It's better than Excel in almost every way, but graphing isn't one of them. I'll eventually get this moved to Google Charts.)

Edit: answered too soon. If you want durations on the sealant info tab that will be a challenge - multiple tests per product, so multiple columns to show test results. If I categorize them it will start to look like the pivot tab. I could add an average - would that work?

Edit 2: Done. Added an average to the "Sealants" tab.

[Cruzscarwash]

Will do. For now, the duration in weeks is on the "Graph data" tab. (Have go through a few steps to get data graphed in Google Sheets. It's better than Excel in almost every way, but graphing isn't one of them. I'll eventually get this moved to Google Charts.)

Edit: answered too soon. If you want durations on the sealant info tab that will be a challenge - multiple tests per product, so multiple columns to show test results. If I categorize them it will start to look like the pivot tab. I could add an average - would that work?

Edit 2: Done. Added an average to the "Sealants" tab.

Rippy has anyone today told you that you are awesome?>

[RippyD]

Thanks much. You need to influence my wife.

[Finick]

I’m curious how PNS will stack up on the value list. Seems fairly durable and very quick application.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[RippyD]

Me too on PNS. Really looking forward to seeing how a few of these do.

btw, here's how I'm handling my actual application times: I'm typically doing all 4 doors and rear quarter panels of the Rover. That's about 56% the surface area of the Sentra. In addition to adjusting for the size difference, I'm multiplying by 1.5 to account for the Rover doors being big, flat panels. Doing bumpers, the trunk, and grill on a small car take considerably more time. I'm also moving quickly and not buffing to get the best look like I would when applying ever 3 months.

Even with the 1.5x multiplier this is a rough estimate. It would realistically take 1/2 as long or 2x what I estimated depending on how fast you move, how much you buff your sealants, weather, etc. So please take these actuals as a rough estimate. (In other words, ymmv.)

[Markymapo]

So much for WG DGS, time to switch to something more durable.. awesome work

[RippyD]

Keep in mind that DGS is on the Sentra roof right now. It may go longer than it did before. I doubt it'll get into the FK 1000 and Collinite range.

Also remember that longevity is only one factor. If you're going to reapply every 3 months and the product lasts 3 months, that would be adequate. I still use Aquawax despite the short longevity. Based on testing I may switch to something else. And when I use up the 1/2 gallon I have left.