Ceramic Coating for Cedarburg, Wisconsin

From our shop

About 30 minutes

Price

Quoted per vehicle

Prep

Assessed per vehicle

Handles

Droppings, sap, tannin

What lands on a car in three days

Festival weekends fill the residential streets around downtown with parked vehicles under mature tree cover, and for the length of the event those vehicles collect what the canopy drops: bird droppings, sap, and in autumn, wet leaves.

Droppings are the urgent one. They are acidic, and on bare clear coat in sun they begin etching within hours — a dropping left through a hot Saturday and Sunday leaves a permanent dull outline of itself that only polishing removes. Sap is slower but it bonds hard as it dries, and leaf tannin stains light paint over a wet weekend. A car that sat through a festival on a tree-lined street usually comes off it with a few of each.

Time is the whole product here

A coating does not stop a dropping landing. What it does is give the owner time. On a coated surface the dropping sits on the coating rather than on the clear coat, so the hours before it is removed do far less damage — the etch that would have happened on bare paint over a weekend mostly does not happen on a coating.

When the owner gets back to the car on Monday, the dropping wipes off a coated bonnet with a damp cloth. On bare paint it leaves a mark that is now a correction job. That difference, repeated over every festival weekend for years, is the argument.

Prep on a tree-parked car

A Cedarburg vehicle that has done a few years of street parking under canopy usually has bonded sap, tannin marks and some dropping etch already on the paint. A coating seals in whatever is underneath it, so all of that is removed first — decontamination, and correction where the etching is visible — and that prep is what moves the price from the quoted figure.

September is the right month: the summer's damage can be corrected first, cure conditions are good, and the coating goes on ahead of the autumn leaf season and the winter after it.