Get Your New Car Ceramic Coated in Hornsby

If you're in Hornsby, Wahroonga, Turramurra, Pymble, St Ives, or anywhere on the Upper North Shore, your car's paint is up against a lot. The Pacific Highway commute means road grime and stone chips daily. Trees along the leafy streets drop sap and attract birds that leave their mark on anything parked underneath. And Australian UV oxidises unprotected clear coat faster than most people expect, especially through summer.

Ceramic coating handles all of that. We use Gtechniq Crystal Serum Ultra, a professional-only ceramic coating rated at 10H pencil hardness with a 9-year manufacturer warranty. It bonds to your clear coat to create a hydrophobic, UV-resistant shell that makes washing easier and keeps the paint looking new for years.

What ceramic coating actually does

Clear coat is the thin, transparent layer on top of your car's paint. It's what gives the paint its gloss and protects the colour underneath from fading. The problem is that clear coat itself isn't particularly tough. UV breaks it down over time, bird droppings and tree sap etch into it if they sit too long, and every wash leaves fine scratches that dull the finish.

Ceramic coating adds a harder layer on top of the clear coat. Gtechniq Crystal Serum Ultra cures to 10H pencil hardness, which is harder than the clear coat itself. It's also hydrophobic, so water beads up and rolls off instead of sitting on the surface. That means less water spotting, less dirt sticking, and easier washing. The coating also blocks UV and resists chemical etching from bird droppings, tree sap, and road contaminants.

The result is a car that stays glossy with less effort. You still need to wash it, but the paint doesn't degrade the way it would without protection. Our customers on the North Shore typically notice the biggest difference in how easy the car is to keep clean, especially if they're parking under trees.

How the process works

You drop the car off at our Hornsby workshop and we take it from there. The process runs over 1–2 days depending on the vehicle and the condition of the paint.

First, we do a full decontamination wash to remove any bonded contaminants, tar spots, and iron fallout that a regular wash won't touch. Then we clay bar the surface so it's completely smooth.

Next is paint correction. This is the most time-consuming part. We machine-polish the paint in stages to remove swirl marks, water spots, and any scratches that can be levelled out. The goal is to get the paint as close to perfect as possible before the coating goes on, because once it's coated, whatever's underneath is locked in.

Once the paint is corrected, we apply the Gtechniq Crystal Serum Ultra coating. By the time you pick it up, the coating has fully bonded and the car is ready to drive.

Our Hornsby workshop

We're at 10 Leonard St, corner of Leonard St and James St, down the hill from McDonalds. We're just down the road from the dealerships on the Pacific Highway, and a lot of our customers bring their new car straight to us after picking it up. We've been doing paint protection on the North Shore for over 30 years, and ceramic coating has been a core part of what we do for the last decade. If you're wondering whether ceramic coating makes sense for your car, we wrote a guide on whether ceramic coating is worth it.