Hey guys, Anthony with The Rag Company and in today's video we're going to be coating every single surface of this Subaru Crosstrek with G-Techniq ceramic coating. All right, welcome back to another detailing related video where today we are jumping into some G-Techniq coating goodness on this 2024 Subaru Crosstrek. Now this vehicle is brand spanking new. It came off the truck just a week ago, got dropped off here at The Rag Company, and now it is ready for an almost full coating job exterior and interior. So what I want to do is walk you through the overall condition of the paint, talk about kind of the process and what we're going to do, and then jump into a lot of hard work. So first and foremost, we've already washed this here in the studio. We hit it with some G-Techniq citrus foam, helped kind of remove a little bit of that adhesive residue that was left over from shipping. Then we went through and we actually clay bar the vehicle as well. Now during our initial inspection, there was just some light marring just from probably leaning on the vehicle or just through transport, but nothing crazy. So we're going to take our scan grip here and come take a look at the paint. One of the first things I noticed was a couple finite scratches here on the outside of this hood here. So we have a couple light ones. I kind of tried to pick it at them to see if it was adhesive. I'm not 100% sure yet, so just note that that's something that we're going to have to polish out. The rest of the paint here, this is going to be, I would say, a pretty straightforward process. If you look under certain light, right, this obviously has some pretty aggressive body lines on here, but what I'm seeing here is just light micromarring. I mean directional micromarring, which could have been maybe a walk by with a shirt, maybe there's some dust on the surface, maybe the dealership was like, "Oh, nice car, cool paint." What people don't realize is that whenever you touch a vehicle, whether there's dust on it, whether it seemingly looks clean, chances are you are inducing micromarring. Me going like this, I guarantee you there's something there. So we're going to hopefully fix that. I'm not seeing anything yet that would require me to jump into with a microfiber pad or a wool pad. Nothing that's standing out to me yet. So over here, it looks like we got, oh, actually a paint defect from, looks like manufacturing, but just a small little dust nib there. Not a big deal. The color is gorgeous. I mean, this, the flakiness is amazing. It's a beautiful, beautiful color, but I think all this is going to clean up extremely, extremely well. Now, as far as a fix on this paintwork, it should be pretty straightforward. I'm going to grab a yellow pad from our friends over at Buff and Shine, probably the new Edge Guard once. It's pretty fancy. I'm going to grab a three inch yellow pad from our friends over at Rupes, throw those on some Rupes machines, grab my final polish and go through and just give this a paint enhancement. All right. So a quick update on the 2024 Crosstrek. So far, so good. We've prepared virtually everything on this car for coatings at this point in time, which means we went through and machine polished the paint. This refined the paint, removed scratches, removed some light swirls, and overall it's going to help with the adhesion of the CSL coating and the EXO coating. We went through a panel wipe, cleaned all of the plastics. We polished out the front windshield and we even removed the wheels and gave them a deep clean for those coatings as well. So C5 is going to go on the wheels. At this point in time, we are ready to rock and roll for the coating process. So all we have left to do is open up some boxes, put on some gloves and lay down that saucy gloss. All right. So jumping into the good stuff here, we have our table of coatings. We have panel wipes starting here on the left. We have G-Techniq CSL, an absolute staple in G-Techniqs lineup. We have C4 trim coating, C5 wheel armor, and then we also have EXO V5. Now EXO V5 is new for 2023. If you haven't checked out the reformulation, you got to try it. The hydrophobics are amazing. It's a single layer application and it's even glossier than ever. Now, of course, for our wipe off towels, we're going to be using our premium purple pearls, one of my favorite coating leveling and removing towels. Definitely a must have. So at this point in time, the car is technically prepped. We've gone through the panel wipe and wiped over it multiple times, but it's always a good idea just to touch things up as needed. So if any type of dust collects before the coating or anything, just grab another towel, grab a little Panel Wipe, spray it a couple of times, go through and rewipe that area. But overall, we are ready to rock and roll. So opening up the Crystal Serum Light here, breaking that seal. Oh, that wasn't as nice as I thought it was going to be. But you know what? We're animals here. So we have gloves here that come with CSL. We have our ultra soft applicator here, which actually is not bad. We love our microfiber applicators that we have here at the Rag Company, but for what it is, this is actually a pretty decent. Then here in the box, we have CSL and of course our dropper here. Now a pro tip with CSL, only crack this lid when you are ready to coat. Don't crack it, look at it and go, cool, I'm going to store it for a few months. No, keep this sealed. Do not attach this until you are ready for the coating job, which today we are. So I'm going to crack this open, set that aside, and then take my dropper and drop this in and reattach Cool. Gloves on, let's re-Panel wipe this hood and let's get to the coating. All right, so jumping into the coating, something that I personally like to do with all of my coating jobs is I like to do the horizontal surfaces first, including the hood and the roof. The reason why I don't like to do the vertical surfaces is because I am leaning over them. I don't want to coat the spender and then be leaning all over it and possibly mar it up. It's going to reduce my chances of marring and I have to do touch up and repolish this area. I can do that without having to remove any coating before applying more onto it, if that makes sense. So for this, again, this is kind of collected, I don't know, a little bit of dust. Take a little bit more Panel Wipe here, go over, spread it around, wipe it off. This is going to degrease the panel, remove any of the polishing oils that may have been left over from when I was machine polishing with the Final Polish and the Last Cut compound, and that looks pretty good. Now I was a little concerned about this particular vinyl here. This is a really thick vinyl compared to most automotive vinyl I see. This is definitely one of those OEM vinyls that it's meant to last many, many years, but chances are it's going to crack and look pretty bad after a few, but coating it is going to hopefully preserve it for longer. So again, it's got kind of this thickness. I don't know how to describe it, but we can go ahead and spray some panel wipe on that and then get that cleaned up as well. So spreading this in. And my process and plan for this is that I am going to be coating this vinyl piece here in CSL. I don't think it's going to negatively affect this. I think it's actually going to absorb it quite well, but if you wanted to play it safe and this was maybe a true vinyl piece that you wanted to, I don't know, reduce any risk of excessive gloss or depth on something matte like this. You could use something like G-Techniq's Halo, which is going to be more of a flexible coating for wrap, but I'm going to call it good with CSL and we're going to see what happens. So the hood is now prepped and ready to rock and roll for the coating. Now if I want to, I can go back through. I can repanel wipe the fenders, the front bumper, any of the plastics as needed, but this is just going to be kind of for demo purposes here. So setting my towel aside, I'm going to be grabbing my G-Techniq Crystal Serum. So what I like to do for this is make sure my temperature first and foremost is good when I'm applying it. It's about 65-ish degrees in here. I would guess the humidity is somewhere around 25-30 percent, very low humidity here in the studio. So grabbing this, cracking this open. So gloves on here. I'm going to prime my pad, applying my CSL to the pad itself. And for the first kind of go around, I'm going to make sure I have a decent amount of product on here just so I don't have any dry spots. From here, depending on how big my hood is or how big my surface is, I may cut this into thirds. I may cut this into quarters. I may cut it in half. With CSL, I'm pretty comfortable with it and with the temperature in here, I'm also really comfortable. So I'm going to go ahead and say let's try to knock out half the hood at a time and go from there. So I'm going to draw my drip line right here in the middle, and then I'm going to start pulling from that. If you wanted to, you could also start your drip line right here in the middle and then pull from it evenly. I just know that I'm going to be coming back from that area and bringing it back towards me. So in doing that, I can make sure that my coverage is pretty even. Now I'm not feeling anything drying out yet, but right around here it's starting to feel a little bit dragged. So I'm going to grab a little bit more CSL, apply it to my applicator, then we'll go ahead and do another kind of drip line right there, and then pull from that. Done. So at this point I'll come through, make sure I don't either have any missed spots or anything, any large gaps that I just kind of overlooked, but it looks like I have really good coverage here. So we're going to let this start to flash, and I'm going to start on the other side, and by the time the other side's done applying, I'm ready to start wiping here, ready to start wiping here, so I'm going to time this appropriately for my application and my wipe off. So I'm not letting this cure, wiping it, and then having to do another side. I'm going to try to time it appropriately Cool. Crack this open. And if you come over here, we'll see what the coating is looking like. You can see that everything crosshatch perfectly, but we have kind of that residue, that beading starting to happen on the surface. That's one of our first signs that the coating is ready to be leveled and removed. That feels, feels good. That's actually, that was perfect timing. I can't say I always have perfect timing, but that was like a perfect timing wipe off. That feels incredible. So go through with my first towel, start leveling everything out here, flip the towel as needed. So over here, we are, we're pretty close. I'd probably say another 15, 20 seconds or so, and then we're going to flip this towel, wipe this off. Nice. Okay. Another perfect wipe off. If you've done coatings for a while, then you know what I mean when I say a perfect wipe off. There are certain times where the timing may be wrong, the humidity could be wrong, the temperature may be slightly wrong. So it might feel different in different coating situations or in different cars in general, but when it feels good, it feels good. And CSL is one of those coatings that, oh man, just, just CSL on its own feels great. Go through, level that out. And we are going to grab our secondary towel here. We'll set the first one aside, because we're still going to use the first one for other coating leveling, but this is just going to be kind of my follow-up towel. You can also use an ultra plush towel with CSL. If you want to use something like an Eagle 500, a 350, a 600, even an Everest. I just personally like the, the two Pearl towel combo. I've always felt that this does a really good job. Now I'm checking for high spots. I'm looking for anything that's casting a shadow, like a darker shadow that doesn't look correct. You can use a light to try to help find high spots, but I find that when you over wash out an area with too much light, it's actually harder to find. So using shadows to your advantage to try to find those high spots is actually sometimes more advantageous. So I'm not seeing anything though. This towel does a really good job at knocking down this coating right off the bat and it feels exceptionally smooth. And we are done. I don't want to rub on it too much because we still have another layer of EXO V5 to apply once we make our way around the car. All right. So now that you have the main gist of how CSL is applied, hopefully it didn't bore you to death there, we are going to continue with that same process on the rest of the vehicle. Again, with the roof and then all of the vertical panels, such as the fenders, the doors, the hatch, the front bumper, and all of that, and have this coated and ready to rock and roll for the next step. Do you like what you see? Are you having a good time? Well, it's going to get even better because at the end of the video, we're going to show you the hydrophobic properties of everything that we've coated in today's video. All right. So somehow I convinced Josh Brodal will take over for my CSL application so I could jump over here for a quick C5 tutorial. So C5 wheel armor from G-Techniq, one of the best wheel coatings out there. It's phenomenal. It's going to last, gosh, over two years. I've had some going on three years at this point with particular applications and it's a very, very durable wheel coating that can also be used in other high temperature aspects. So like your exhaust tips, for example, your control arms, your suspension, heck, even your valve cover on your engine. It's insane how many different things you can use C5 on, which is really cool. So for the process of this, we've already went through and deep cleaned this wheel or cleaned it to the best of our abilities. We used some multipurpose cleaner here on the tires. We used the fallout remover here on the face of the wheels. And now all we have left to do is just to dry up some of this water. So for that, I'm going to use Panel Wipe. Taking some Panel Wipe, spraying a little bit on the face of the wheel. This is going to prep it for the next step. So go through and this is going to remove anything that we may have missed during the cleaning process. And again, with this being a new car, there's not much grime on these. But if your wheels are really dirty, you absolutely want to, I mean, deep clean those things to the best of your abilities before coating them. Otherwise, that coating is going to go right over the top of the dirt and lock it in and you don't want that. So panel wipe here, going through, cleaning this up. Now what I like to do is knock out the face of the wheel really quick like this. Get this all nice and ready to rock and roll. And then I'm going to flip the wheel on its side and spray more panel wipe into my towel itself and then go through and start wiping out the barrel because I'm going to be applying C5 to the barrel as well. All right, so the wheel flipped here. We have just our empty barrel, which is nice and clean. You got a couple little marks here from probably when they were mounting the tires, but not bad. I'm going to spray my Panel Wipe here, here, here, and here. Go through and then wipe this out. Now a lot of people overlook coating the barrels, which is crazy to me. That's probably the most important thing to coat, in my opinion. A coated barrel, it cleans up beautifully. If there's ever any type of liquid spill or brake fluid or anything that leaks out, it's simply going to bead off. It's not going to destroy your finish inside the wheel. So always, always, always coat your barrels if you can. Otherwise, I mean, the faces are just fine, but the barrels, I'm a sucker for clean barrels. So go through, a couple more sprays of panel wipe, knock out the back of these spokes, and we are ready to start. All right, so we've gone ahead and panel wipe the wheels so they are ready to rock and roll. The barrels are good, the face of the wheels are good, and in each C5 coating application kit, you're going to get four applicators, one applicator for each wheel. Two sides for two sides of the wheel. So what I'm going to do is take one side here, apply my C5 to it, go through and begin my barrel application. So for this, I'll usually create, again, some type of drip line right here to pull from and then start spreading it in. Cool, so now we're going to let this sit for a minute or two and then take one of our purple Pearls, knock it down, then we're going to flip it around and knock out the face. All right, so now we're ready to knock out the faces of the wheels. So the reason why I like to knock out the barrels first is because once the barrels are done, they're done. I don't have to pick up the wheel again, I don't have to flip it over. I can simply knock out the face application here, call it good. And that way I'm not spraying any more panel wipe and getting over spray from spraying the backside and getting it onto the front after I've coated the front. It just reduces cross-contamination in general. So flipping my applicator to my other clean side here, applying some C5. And I usually like to start on a particular spoke or line and then kind of just pull from that. So I'm going to go something like that and then to start drawing it on. All right, so that is one down and three more to go. I'm going to finish the other three off camera, then we're going to continue over to the Crosstrek to knock out the trim and then of course, the EXO application. Let's get to it. Alright, so I'm going to give you guys a quick demonstration of C4 trim restore. Now the boys got a little ahead of themselves and they went through and started restoring and coating most of the trim here on this vehicle. And they left me with about a few drops left, but it's just enough to show you what this looks like. So taking my C4 trim restore, I'm going to apply it to my pad. We're going to go ahead and create our drip line probably really right here in the middle and then pull from that. Oh, that looks pretty good. Then from here, start applying and spreading it in. Now as far as what this is going to do, this is going to darken the trim and it's going to add more UV protection. Now when it comes to restoring trim, right old trim, typically we don't like to jump straight into a ceramic coating. Not usually. We like to restore it first with something like solution finish. And then if we want to, we can coat it afterwards. But when it comes to fresh new trim, straight out of the mold, it's completely 100% safe to ceramic coat. There's really no downsides of doing it. It's going to make things easier to clean and it's going to make it look better for longer. We're going to go ahead and take our Pearl weave towel and then knock everything down in the feel. The feel is quite nice. Even on a textured trim like this, the feel is very, very smooth, very, very slick. And you already know it's going to clean up well on that next wash based off that alone. Time for EXO V5. Are you guys ready? All right. So moving on to XO V5, this was an improvement over the V4 with now V5 being a single step application. You no longer need two layers. You're still going to get over two years of durability. You're going to get intense water behavior. Of course, you're going to have chemical resistance and of course UV resistance as well. So very easy to use. It's going to go on top of our CSL. It's been roughly, I think probably about an hour and a half, two hours since our CSL application. So it is ready to go and we can put it directly on top of that with no other prep needed. So taking our EXO V5 here, cracking this open, taking your applicator that comes into the kit. We're going to go ahead and basically do the same method as we did for CSL. Apply this to our applicator, get a decent amount on, and then step over here. We're going to create a drip line probably right here in this third section of the hood. We're going to pull from it and probably do half the hood at a time. So again, create our drip line coming to about right there. Then from here, we're going to begin pulling and spreading that about halfway through the hood. EXO V5, it's extremely easy to use. I mean on its own, it's an amazing coating. With CSL, it's even better. So don't let this deter you from just using it on its own if you want to do it like that. But in the combo kit with CSL, you're getting three plus, four plus years of durability. In some situations, you're even getting well over five. So I'm going to top this off with just a little more product here. Now what you'll notice is that this CSL will attempt, I mean it will attempt to repel the EXO. And that's just because it'll start beading up pretty fast. But just know that this is completely normal. This is part of the process. And don't stress out about it. Now we're going to take our first towel. Again, starting where we initially started and begin to our wipe off here. We're going to use the two towel method again. Taking this towel, knocking down that V5. That timing was just about perfect. Filling a little bit of grabbiness, but not a lot. So from here, we have the rest of the car to do. So we're just going to repeat the steps and knock out the rest of this and EXO V5. So we've already attempted to go with G-Techniqs G5 water repellent coating. So for this, we started with panel wipe to prep the glass first. Now typically you would use G4 to also clean the glass as that is a glass polish. But since this is a new vehicle, we were able to jump straight in with G5. We applied it in straight line and circular motions and then let it haze up for 20 to 30 minutes. After letting it haze up, we went back through with a microfiber towel and simply removed it and it is ready for the road. Now for the interior of the Subaru Crosstrek, it didn't have too much dirt buildup, but it did have quite a bit of debris over driving for the last few weeks. So we opted by taking all of the mats out of the vehicle and then using some G-Techniq all-purpose cleaner and begin scrubbing them with a stiff bristle brush. After scrubbing them, we simply pressure wash them off. And of course they looked like brand new again as they are still pretty much new mats. Now the rest of the vehicle was treated to a quick vacuum session. Again, this wasn't bad by any means, but we used a couple different crevice tools and of course the vacuum just to pick up some loose dust. Now as far as our cleaner goes, we used G-Techniq's Tri-Clean. This helped us clean up any bit of extra dust and also had some light spillage from a drink or two. So this simply removed it with just a few passes. This also was used to prep the seats and all the other surfaces for the coatings that were about to be applied. So we were able to wipe down the leather, wipe down the fabric, the armrest, and of course all of the plastics. After wiping everything down, we pulled out Smart Fabric from G-Techniq and began applying this to the carpeted areas. Now to apply this, you want to begin by having a clean area. So make sure you're vacuuming thoroughly and if you do need to go through and scrub with an all-purpose cleaner or something like Tri-Clean, do that and then let the surface dry to a completely dry finish. After doing that, we went through with the Leather Guard and a Pearl puck applicator. The easiest way to do this is to apply Leather Guard directly to the puck itself and then a couple sprays on the surface and begin working in straight line and up and down motions to have a nice cross-hatching effect and then take an extra microfiber towel to knock everything down. At this point, all of the fabric as well as the leather, all is now coated in G-Techniqs interior coatings and these are going to set up beautifully and obviously have fantastic water repellent behavior once they dry. All right guys, so it's been two weeks since our application of G-Techniqs CSL and EXO V5 on this Subaru Crosstrek and to be honest, this thing still looks pretty dang clean. It hasn't been touched or washed in two weeks but it has seen some snow, it has seen some rain, and it has seen some dirty back roads but for the most part, the self-cleaning behavior of EXO V5 is pretty dang good. But we know many of you just want to see that beautiful water behavior on all of the coated surfaces so for the next one minute, enjoy nothing but pure coating behavior and I think you'll be as impressed as I am. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] All right guys, so hopefully you enjoyed all of that coating behavior on all of the different surfaces here on this Subaru Crosstrek. Needless to say, all that hard work paid off and coatings are a beautiful thing. So as always, if you guys enjoy this kind of detailing content, please make sure to give us a big thumbs up, subscribe down below for more, and stay tuned for more videos right here at The Rag Company.
