Is my paint coming off?!?

[Mr Detailer]

I have 56K, so I don't really want to load the site (too many pictures on the home page) but I believe you're referring to the Poorboy's Wheel Sealant? If so, yes that product is very good on wheels. I prefer to just use a paint sealant instead though, since I already have it. No need to spend another 15 bucks when I can just use something I already have and get the same results right?

I'll see if I can find those pics I took the other day...
I was able to wipe off 2 months worth of brake dust from the INSIDE of my wheel, with one wipe of my wash mitt (dedicated to wheels of course) and ordinary car shampoo.

 

[Mr Detailer]

Here you can see the extent of the brake dust. The left side was cleaned with ordinary car shampoo in about 5 seconds.
This is the FRONT right wheel, after about 2 months without being cleaned (the inside)

Here's the same shot, after a quick wipe of the rest of the inside.

It should be pretty obvious that sealing your wheels is well worth it. When I remove them to put my snow tires on next weekend, the wheel cleanup will be easy as pie.

 

[Mr Detailer]

And yes, any wheel sealant or paint sealant will be safe to use on any wheels, as long as they don't contain abrasives. I can't think of any sealants that do contain any abrasives.

Now back to the original purpose of the thread. Feel free to PM me with any more questions. I don't want to take this thread too far off course.

 

[clicknext]

Sorry, I've been uhh.. preoccupied for the past few days and havn't had time to check back or think about this issue.

You know what I think it might well be some kind of outside material as some of you suggested. The paint feels quite smooth, and looks that way as well. When there is water on it, there is still a lot of beading. I thought about it, and the fact that it formed a sort of evenly distributed layer that day on my windows and windshield makes it unlikely that it came off my paint, because I sprayed my windows after washing them, and given the fact that the yellow dust stuff came off just from me driving the car tells me that the water would have washed it off. And also they weren't on there in patterns of water streaks, just very even distribution.

I still can't really figure out what they were, though. But hopefully the paint doesn't just start coming off.

About the Nu-Finish, there have been a lot of people saying it's bad, but personally by my standards, it's pretty good stuff, and left my car looking very good. I've done some searching and apparently Nu-Finish is a synthetic, which I guess explains the incredibly long lasting beading effect and its claim of being a "once a year" polish. Some people swear by it, and I guess to each their own. the initial experience I have with it is good (assuming it didn't cause paint to come off) and I'll keep using it until I can really see some real proof that it's bad stuff.

Thanks for the help... I'll post more if anything develops.

 

[Mr Detailer]

I can see from the pictures that you had a dust accumulation at the base of your side windows, and then you drove the car shortly after a wash, which caused water to be sucked out of the seals at the base of the windows, and carried that yellow dust with it.

I'm going to make a psychic prediction here, and say that you washed your car, then applied NuFinish, and then drove the car, right?

NuFinish IS crap. Any polished paint will bead water, whether there's any protection on the paint or not. Water beads when the attraction between the water molecules (cohesive forces) are stronger than the attraction of other material (dirt, oxidized paint...) to the water molecules (adhesive forces). If you wash and polish the car, you've removed the oxidized paint and dirt, which means the surface is clean, and thus, water will bead because there is nothing on the paint that can provide an attractive force greater than the force of the water molecules attracting each other.

That also explains why a dirty car (even if it was waxed the day before) will have pretty crappy beading action. The wax is there, creating a smooth surface free of attractive forces, but once the dirt gets on there with all its charges, the water is more strongly attracted to the dirt than to itself. Thus the irregularly shaped "beads" of water that form on a dirty car. If there is enough oxidation on the paint, water will form more of a "pool" on the paint, because there are so many charges pulling on the water molecules, that they spread out as flat as possible.

 

[clicknext]

I'm going to make a psychic prediction here, and say that you washed your car, then applied NuFinish, and then drove the car, right?

Haha, sorry but I'm going to have to tell you that your mind reading skills didn't work this time. The Nu-Finish was applied about 3 weeks before this happened, and it was not driven immediately after. Fast forward 3 weeks, I wash my car again, and then I just leave it there without driving it until the next day, when I look and find that it has the dust. The pictures were taken one additional day after that, after the car had been driven, causing the dust to gather at the bottom.

And I guess the thing about beading makes sense. Reminds me of my chemistry course a bit too much (I'm doing quite poorly, never taking another chemistry coures again). However, can you explain why the beading after using Nu-Finish and indeed even nearly a month after applying it, is greater than on a brand new car after a wash but no wax?

Well I guess I, being the lazy guy that I am, will be a Nu-Finish sucker for just a while longer then... I don't mean to ask for your advice and go directly against it; I'm very thankful for it. But personally I cannot justify all that work put into the car's appearance if there's an easier way out.

 

[Mr Detailer]

Sure. New cars don't have any protection applied to them until the dealer preps them for sale. They sit out in the hot sun all day, and get oxidized fast. And they also get paint contamination quickly, since industrial fallout and other airborne contaminants are allowed to settle on the paint, migrate in, and get further baked into the clear by the sun. In addition, those particles stuck in the paint contain charges, just like dirt, which attract the water molecules. The adhesive forces are numerous, which means they will cause the water droplets to be pulled from various directions (flattened), and will not allow the water drops to bead up.

And NuFinish leaves behind protection, which explains the beading after a month. No confusion there.

Please understand though, that people like me wouldn't spend a couple grand on detailing stuff if we could get by the same with a couple bottles of NuFinish and come cheap cotton rags from Walmart.