Past 8000 miles now. Not a whole lot of changes. I've installed Ford Racing hood struts (as they should have come from the factory) so I don't need the stick to hold the hood open any more. I also swapped in the '18 model year dual tone horn, since they moved to a pathetic sounding single tone horn for the '19 model year.
Last weekend I took advantage of the long holiday weekend to visit my cousin who does a bit of auto detail work on the side and assisted him in doing a ceramic coating on the car.
It's luscious. The paint feels practically oiled now, it's so smooth.
Unfortunately I didn't get much as far as in progress photos go.
We started with a standard wash and dry, a quick clay bar to pull what large contaminants it had on the paint, then a quick rinse before we addressed two small areas of spiderweb scratches on the paint with a dual action polisher and light compound. At this stage it already looked and felt great. Following that the car was sprayed down with Iron X to fully remove any very small bits left, and based on the amount of purple that showed up there was a surprising amount still left.
The Iron X was rinsed off and followed with an IPA solution to fully dry and remove any leftover residue. Photo below is after the first quick rinse of the Iron X.
Also addressed were my wheels. At some point several months ago I suddenly had a bunch of white scratch marks show up on my spokes. Not sure what caused them, but they were pretty evenly spread around all the wheels and into the centers where they're inset from the edges and tires. I haven't curbed them or done anything stupid enough to run them into anything, so I just don't know what caused it. In any case my cousin took a bit of compound on his small polisher and was able to remove about 80% of them, so the wheels look so much better now.
Before and after:
And then the ceramic coating. He uses Element 119 System X, and we went with their top Diamond coating. Application process is pretty simple given the preceding several hours of prep work. Given that it was in the upper 80s temperature wise the day we were working the coating flashed off fairly quickly, so we had to go quickly. He applied it panel by panel and I followed behind a minute or two afterward buffing to a smooth and glossy finish. The changeover of the feel of the paint through the microfiber towels was crazy, they slide over almost effortlessly. I did miss two small areas and the coating set up too much before we noticed at which point it could no longer be buffed by hand, we had to use a light compound on the polisher to do the buffing in those areas as the coating was curing so quick.
We also went ahead and put a coat of their glass ceramic coating on my windows while we were at it. That stuff is a two part solution in a sectioned pouch you break the membrane between to mix them before applying. It went on very similar to RainX, but seemed to buff out more easily. I haven't had a chance to drive it in the rain yet to see how the glass coating works, but I'm not completely sold yet. In any case it doesn't hurt to have it.
And the coating is on. Two coats on the front bumper panel, and a not super thorough coat on the wheels because we couldn't be bothered to remove them to do the full cleaning process with all those spokes. The faces you see are done which is good enough for me for now.
At this point we were sweaty, gross, and hungry. A short break was taken to clean up before we went to grab some food somewhere with some neon lights and my cousin brought his fancy camera (He also has his own small photography business). Unfortunately many of the night time photos didn't turn out well as we couldn't find a spot with the right lighting.
So we called it a night and left it in the shop overnight to cure a bit more. The next afternoon we went for a bit of a drive (and some light antics) on the way to lunch with some more family.
The coating manufacturer advises not to get the coating wet or wash the car for 4 days after application to allow it to fully cure. Luckily the weather held out for the most part with only a small sprinkle of rain on day 3, so it wasn't a big issue. After it had cured though we had some lovely tornado spawning storms pass through. I took the Side of Ranch to work that day and left the Mustang parked at home, when I got back from work I found the coating definitely holds up to the hydrophobic claims.
At some point I got a nice bird splat on the hood. It was dry by the time I found it, when I went to spray it with some detailer to wipe it off just the force of spraying it took off most of the residue. A+ performance.
They back the Diamond coating with a Lifetime warranty when applied to vehicles less than 2 years old, and 8 years for vehicles older than 2 years, so it's safe to say they're pretty confident in how it will hold up. I'm quite happy with it, so hopefully it will live up to the hype around these coatings.