Every car wash leaves marks in the clear coat. Wax hides them for a week. Correction removes them — and a ceramic coating keeps them from coming back for years.
Here's what's actually happening to your paint — and what a ceramic coating does about it.
Automatic washes, dirty towels and one-bucket washing drag grit across your clear coat. Thousands of tiny scratches. In the sun they look like a spiderweb — and they're the reason a black car never looks black anymore.
A machine polisher levels the clear coat and removes the scratches — permanently. Not filled, not hidden. Removed. This is the step that makes paint look better than the day it left the dealer.
A liquid glass coating chemically bonds to the clear coat and cures into a hard, slick shell. Dirt doesn't stick. Water sheets off. Bird droppings and bug guts stop etching your paint. And you never wax again.
Pricing is by vehicle size. Every package includes full decontamination, machine work, and a professional coating applied by hand — not a spray-on sealant.
For newer cars and paint that's in good shape already. Enhance the gloss, lock it in.
The one most people take. Real correction, real protection, on a car you plan to keep.
The most I can do to a car short of repainting it. For the vehicle you're never selling.
Vans, 3-row SUVs, lifted trucks and heavily-damaged paint are quoted after inspection. Prices assume paint in serviceable condition — if I find clear coat failure or a bad repaint, I'll tell you straight instead of coating over it.
Fabric, carpet and leather sealed against spills and stains.
Rain beads and flies off above 40 mph. Wipers barely needed.
Yellow, hazy lenses sanded, polished and coated clear.
Degreased, dressed, and photographed. Included in Signature.
A coating is not a product you buy. It's a process you buy. Here's every step, in order.
I come to you. I put a professional inspection light on your paint and show you exactly what's in the clear coat — most people have never seen it. Then I take paint-depth readings on every panel so we know how much clear coat there is to safely work with. You get a written finding and three options. No pressure, no obligation.
~20 minutes · FreeFoam pre-soak, two-bucket hand wash, iron remover to dissolve the brake dust embedded in the paint, then a clay bar to pull out everything the wash left behind. Skip this and you polish the contamination into the paint.
Day 1, morningThe long part. Machine polishing, panel by panel, with depth readings taken as I go so I never take more clear coat than is safe. I'll pull the car back into the light and show you 50/50 — half corrected, half untouched — before I go any further.
Day 1–2 · the bulk of the jobPanels wiped down with a prep solvent to strip every trace of polish oil, then the coating is applied by hand, panel by panel, and leveled at exactly the right moment. Too early and it smears. Too late and it high-spots. This is where experience shows.
Final eveningThe coating needs to sit dry and untouched in your garage overnight. No rain, no dust, no driving. Next morning I walk you around it, hand you the aftercare kit, and show you how to wash it so the coating lasts as long as it's supposed to.
12–24 hours to cure · no water for 7 daysCoatings are chemistry, and chemistry has conditions. Read this before booking — it protects your money and my work.
Because it's a different job. A full detail is 4 hours of cleaning. A coating is 16–30 hours of machine work on your clear coat plus several hundred dollars of professional product that a consumer can't buy off a shelf. Look at it per year instead of per job: the 5-year Armor on a sedan is $1,199, which is about $20 a month for five years of never waxing, never scrubbing bugs off, and a car that still looks new when you sell it.
Those are sealants with ceramic in the name. They sit on top of the paint and last weeks to a couple of months. A professional coating is a different chemistry — it bonds to the clear coat and cures into a hard layer measured in years. And more importantly, a spray goes on top of your swirl marks. It locks the damage in. Correction is the part that actually changes how the car looks.
You can coat over damaged paint. I just won't do it without telling you what you're getting: every scratch that's in the clear coat right now gets sealed under a hard layer for the next five years. If the paint is genuinely clean — a new car, garage kept — Shield's light polish is enough. If it's been through automatic washes, you want correction. The inspection tells us which.
In the wrong hands, yes — that's exactly why I measure. Clear coat is only about 1.5 to 2 mils thick, and I take depth readings on every panel before and during correction so I always know how much I'm working with. If a panel reads thin, I back off and tell you. Anyone who polishes a car without a paint gauge is guessing with your money.
Best possible time. New paint still has swirls in it from dealer prep — but very few — so a light polish gets it near-perfect, and then the coating goes on before the damage ever starts. A new car is the cheapest car to protect and the one that benefits most.
Two buckets, a pH-neutral soap, and a clean microfiber. That's it. Never an automatic brush wash. The coating makes washing dramatically easier — dirt barely holds on — but it's not immune to being scratched by a dirty rag. I'll walk you through it at handoff and send you home with the products to do it.
A $200 deposit holds your date and comes off the total. Balance is due at handoff. Card, Zelle, or cash — whatever's easiest for you.
I'm not going to guess at a price over text. I'll come look at the car, put a light on it, measure the clear coat, and show you what your options actually are.
At your home, office, or job site. I bring the light and the gauge.
Under an inspection light, the swirls show up instantly. Most people have never actually looked.
Paint-depth readings on every panel, written down and given to you — yours to keep whether you book or not.
If your paint doesn't need correction, I'll say so. I'd rather lose one job than sell you something you don't need.
I'll call you to set a time — usually the same day. Bring the car, I'll bring the light.