The modern paints used on today's cars, boats and aircraft are quite remarkable for their range of colours and depth of gloss. But they're not very hairy. Or are they?
Well the answer is that they're not. Unless that is, they're lucky enough to have had G|techniq 3S lavished upon them.
But before we explain why hairy cars are actually good for you, let's find out some more about the paint. Did you know for example that as well as the obvious visual and decorative functions, the paint layer is also most likely the only thing protecting the valuable surfaces beneath?
Increasingly, the total amount of paint, from top to bottom, is less than a human hair thick. In the case of modern automotive paints we're talking about 50 microns of total paint versus the average human hair at around 80 microns.
A micron by the way is a thousandth of a millimetre. So to put things into perspective, around 12 human hairs fits into one millimetre of space with room to spare.
The really amazing thing however is that G|techniq 3S coatings and polishes work on a much smaller, sub-micron scale, just a tiny fraction of total paint thickness. We're talking about nano manipulation and engineering technologies here.
It's actually on such a small scale that the only way to see what's going on is with the aid of a very expensive, very large electron microscope.
As we had mislaid our own one, our friends at the Nano Technologies Research Dept at the University of Riga were kind enough to carry out this analysis for us. We'd like to share with you these amazing images of automotive paint before and after interaction with 3S technology.
Under the microscope
What you see below is the surface of naked, untreated automotive paint.
The changes in colour show the surface roughness. The darker areas are depressions, and the lighter areas peaks. The height difference over the surface is around 80 nanometres, which you can read off the scale on the right side (dark to light colouring from -40nm to +40nm).
We can call this range the "roughness" of the surface, in this case with a score of 80nm. That's the equivalent of one thousandth of the thickness of that average human hair we've been talking about. So pretty smooth.
Too rough and ready
To be honest, we thought it was a bit rough. And more importantly, quite unrefined and none too smart.
You see, with 3S we're able to re-engineer the surface landscape to make it interact better with its surroundings. Add some surface intelligence. So let's see how we do that.
Get busy with the polish
Now you see the same surface after polishing with our 3S polish, P1.
Check the scale on the right to notice that now the unevenness runs from around -20nm to +20nm, or a total roughness of 40 nanometres, about half of what it was before polishing.
