Originally Posted By: Char Baby
I really like the dealer or professionaly applied type rustproofing. It's like truck bed liner coating. The only thing that I don't like is the lousey job being done by the person spraying the stuff on. They always miss the wheel well lip in the rear plus they do a poor job on the rocker panels. The product is what I like but, the installers need to do a better job!
I used to install that stuff for car dealerships mostly. It was actually a tar product, we always used a product produced by Quaker State. In cold weather I had to mix diesel in or it could not be pumped through the gun. I never shot a rocker panel, the product was to be applied inside of the body seams and wheel wells. On some models the wheel wells are pointless since I was spraying tar onto a plastic liner. To apply the product to a wheel lip you would have to do that by hand which is very messy and time consuming, its also not a very professional finish. The wheel lips where never applied unless a specific request was made. That happened once in all the years I worked there. Since it was a tar product it also stayed exactly where it was applied it would not migrate at all. Krown and Fluid Film will migrate and spread across the metal to cover every inch of the car. The only down side to Krown of Fluid Film is it needs to be re-applied every year for maximum protection.
The textured black in the upper right of this pic of Stevies is the product I applied from the looks of it. His entire santa fe is painted silver, bottom included, the black is the undercoat product that is applied after paint. Allot of auto manufacturers are undercoating the cars like this before they leave the factory but the dealerships are still trying to sell it to you in a protection kit even though its already on the car whether you pay for the kit or not. I did not buy the protection package on my car but it is still undercoated just the same.
For those in the U.S. that cannot obtain Krown, Fluid Film has a kit so you can undercoat your own car for less then $100 and it includes the gun to apply it. Actually they give you enough product for 2 normal sized sedans easily.
Fluid Film Kit #2
I also want to add that the undercoating applied by the auto manufacturers appears to be a bit different. For 1 its harder then the tar product would be once full cured and the texture is different. An easy test is to take any kind of petroleum solvent to it, if it comes off easily then its a petroleum based product. Gas, diesel, laquer thinner all worked for removing the undercoating I applied. Thinner obviously worked better then gas or diesel, acetone or xylene better still but you don't want to rub acetone on a new car so laquer thinner was the harshest I ever used.