Silica Spray Showdown: McKee's v. Gyeon v. CarPro

Which product provided the best beading throughout the testing period?

  • Product A

    Votes: 11 31.4%

  • Product B

    Votes: 10 28.6%

  • Product C

    Votes: 6 17.1%

  • They were all roughly equivalent

    Votes: 8 22.9%
  • Total voters
    35
Cruzscarwash said:
Wait so no one still knows what the A B AND c are correct? We all find out at the same time?

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No one knows. I don't even know. The bottles are still taped up and put away.

Basically I want to see how the products do long term. I'd like to see how each section performs at 2w, 4w and 3 months - if they last that long. I'm going to be practical since I suspect the life of these sprays in the real world is going to be 6-8w.

I don't think there's any good reason to do the reveal now, because biases will start setting in and products will be judged based on brand loyalties, etc.
 
kevincwelch said:
No one knows. I don't even know. The bottles are still taped up and put away.

Basically I want to see how the products do long term. I'd like to see how each section performs at 2w, 4w and 3 months - if they last that long. I'm going to be practical since I suspect the life of these sprays in the real world is going to be 6-8w.

I don't think there's any good reason to do the reveal now, because biases will start setting in and products will be judged based on brand loyalties, etc.
Click to expand...

Wow, this is a great cliffhanger. Thanks again for your detailed test.
 
Interesting to see Mckee's was the most expensive as the line in general is very affordable. The concentrated version of Hydro2 is different in terms of performance from the Hydro2 Lite. Properly diluted, Hydro2 is a little "stronger" than the Lite version.

Great test though.
 
He's using hydro2 lite. RTU to be on a level playing ground. I'm sure if you used hydro just straight no dilution it would last longer than 3:1 or 4:1 too. Regular maint seems like 7:1 is pretty good


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Here is my 2 week update. I have opinions about which is leading the race.

Conditions
Over the past two weeks, the car has seen rainy weather and has traveled on interstate highways. I would say that it got less than its usual use and abuse since we were out of town for a few days and it sat in the garage. I cleaned the hood a total of 2 times with N914 using the waterless dilution and heavily saturated the hood each time.

My wife parked under a tree Friday evening and I didn`t discover these goodies until this afternoon when I did the test.



There was one on each side of the hood, and the outcome was the same on both sides. I used the technique to clean bird bombs as described by Mike Phillips.






So, whatever is protecting Panel A and Panel C (Panel B was not affected by any bird bombs) did a fine job. I did not see any etching at all after about 18 hours of massive bird bombs sitting on the hood.

Cleaning
Today I cleaned it with a heavy saturation of N914 using the waterless dilution before performing the test. There wasn`t much beading when applying the N914, but I don`t consider that a good test of a LSP`s ability to bead water. N914 did a fine job of grabbing the grime and dirt off the hood, and it certainly was no skin off my back to wipe the hood dry afterwards. The panels felt uniformly smooth and slick. I used Shine and Buff towels to do the cleaning and Eagle Edgeless towels to do the buffing. Looks great across the board.




Beading Test
Here are the pictures of the beading. The first picture is the beading immediately after the application of the silica spray, and the second picture is the beading of the same panel today (2 weeks).

Panel A




Panel B




Panel C




My opinions: all three panels demonstrate decreased performance. Hard to tell, but A and B look similar. C definitely is more disorganized and amorphous.


Sheeting Tests
Judge for yourself.



Conclusions
All panels are slick and reveal that mirror shine, and I think it looks particularly good for a light metallic paint. In terms of wetting ability, all three panels show decreased performance in their ability to bead water. The water droplets are more disorganized, show less contact angle and are more amorphous in appearance. The sheeting is slower in my opinion; however, the materials still do a fine job of getting the water off the hood. Products A and C seemed to protect the clearcoat from those bird bombs, so I feel great about that. Nevertheless, I am getting a feeling that one or all of these products is going to tank somewhere around weeks 4-6. My next report will be 2 weeks from now, and that will be the 1 month mark from the product applications.
 
Thank you for the update. It will be interesting to see if the product will last another two weeks.
 
Thanks for the update Kevin! Looking forward to the month update.
 
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