I`m all for test spots. Can you share how you know when the coating is gone? Can you see it? Do you feel it? If you don`t know when the coating is gone, how do you know how much clear you`re removing?
And I get that using light cut polish it would take a while to wear through clear coat with a DA, but is there a way to tell the coating is gone? Or is that point that if you hit it with a few passes of polish it`s likely good enough?
Since you don`t have a coating on the car to begin with, once you properly prepare the vehicle for your coating and apply it, you will very shortly see a dramatic change in how the paint looks and how well it sheds dirt, etc., and water..
Remember that new coating condition.. Keep the vehicle coating clean using something like CarPro Reset to wash the vehicle, and just monitor the way it looks and acts as the months go by..
Perhaps if you had the most expensive calibrated material thickness gauge and you were very, very, accurate at measurement - before and after - of every square inch of your vehicle`s paintwork, then you might be able to tell when it starts to wear off, etc...
I watched my Optimum coating go through 4+ years (installed late 2011) of having absolutely nothing done to it except a wash and blow water off with a Master Blaster, and it finally started going away sometime this summer..
I never touched it with a correction product, etc., all those years.. didnt need to... it looked great...To the end, it was very clear, glossy, and the the sunlight reflected clearly, straight back into your eyes..
What I noticed about my coating is that after year-2-3 on, it started shedding dirt and water differently, and the clean, washed, coating felt kind of rough..
I wanted to clean that roughness off with something like a very fine claybar, but decided to not touch it (I really wanted to see how long it would last) and instead made sure I washed it very well - sometimes twice - with Carpro Reset only - and that really helped clean out some of that roughness and made the coating cleaner because the way the sun reflected off of it was much sharper and brighter - you could not look at it in the sun without it hurting your eyes...
But there was enough on there protecting my paint (very light surface defects here and there) for me to be able to go over the Black Paint with Optimum Finish Compound on Hydro-Shred Tangerine Pads and a Rotary, and bring huge gloss back to the paintwork for a new coating - this time, Optimum 2.0. (which is no longer made, but it was a new syringe that was perfectly clear)..
My first Claybar process on this paintwork went fine, but it was kind of grabby, so I had to keep a lot of DoDo Juice Born Slippy Clay Lube on it to keep from adding any additional work to the process..
I used a New BlackFire Gray Poly ClayBar for this process, and it did get dirt off the coating.. I cleaned the claybar after each pass..
My Initial pass with Optimum Finish Compound was not normal in that the pad was pretty grabby on the paint, and I attribute this to the coating being removed..
I kept the pad and product moist the whole time, used medium pressure, because this is how I get the best results, and ran it down to almost nothing before I stopped and wiped it off with lots of clean, soft, microfiber towels..
My 2nd pass with the same product, was much easier and acted all normal, so I have to assume that I got through the old Coating and was now just working with the paint (that had not been corrected for 4+ years)
I went through around 14 pads ( 2009 Jeep Grand Cherokee Brilliant Black Crystal Pearl Coat, Metallic) because I wanted to keep the pads clean and not interfere with my coating removal and correction process.. The pads cleaned up just fine with Snappy Clean Powder..
Hope this helps !
DanF
And then, since they are all so new, who knows how durable they will be, and last ??