Chemistry degree required

[TH0001]

Re: Chemistry degree required

Maybe one of the fields I am most familiar with is clinical medicine at a teaching hospital since my job involves transcribing medical reports for a teaching university. And I have watched some of the residents (students) go from their 2nd or 3rd year post medical school graduate through a 5th and 6th year post medical school graduate fellowship and become attending physicians who belong to the faculty and teach medical students, supervise residents, and are running their own clinical trials and collaborating on others and publishing their work. So counting 4 years of medical school, they have become qualified to teach in medical school with 9 or 10 years of training and experience.

The science of medicine just grows so collectively. Any innovation is published, and after an appropriate amount of testing, new technology is available to the entire profession, as are new drugs, any information relevant to the practice of medicine.

And when a physician prescribes a medicine, he or she knows exactly the result of clinical trials, how many patients got better, worse, or stayed the same, what percent had what side effect, how the drug compared to a placebo.

And they know and understand the chemistry of the drug and the process by which it works.

So my sense of the profession of detailing is that detailers don't advance collectively like the medical profession but rather individually. The forums are an exception, as people are willing to share advice and experience, what worked for them for what situation, what products they found work best for what. The advances are made in the chemicals by the makers such as Meguiar's. But there are what we used to call silos in the computer science world.

I am seeing the silos in the people offering training programs. Each training program builds its own silo. Just a vertical blob of people not really communicating with other vertical blobs of people. What you can learn from one is proprietary, not for public knowledge.

What an amazing (and different) perspective on something I have never given much thought to. I have no doubt that many detailers would be far less equipped with knowledge (myself included) if it wasn't for the advent of detailing forums. That said there is a lot of misinformation that also spreads like wildfire.

Medicine as a whole benefits greatly from open communication and shared advances, probably for several reasons:

People's lives are at stake- In detailing most (with rare exception) mistakes can be fixed.

Medicine is regulated by governing bodies- Want to be a doctor? Here is what you must do. Want to be a nurse? You must complete these standards. With detailing, a guy can go to Target, and twenty three dollars later he is a detailer.. There is no governing body, no regulations, and no concrete definition of the word detailer.

Collective geniuses, who have all suprased certain recommendations, formulate procedures that work in most cases on most humans. However, like cars, not all humans are created equally, and some situations require expertise. Performing heart surgery on an infant who has a unique and complex birth defect is beyond the scope of most heart surgeons, for example.

There is also a hiearchy in detailing. Can you go to a school for 2-5 days and learn how to clean most cars pretty good, and not mess too much stuff up? Sure, and if you work hard, market yourself correctly, and offer competitve pricing, you will likely make a decent living.

Should you be correcting original paint on a 6 million dollar automobile at this level? No.

Would detailing in as a whole benefit from more open communication? I don't know honestly. I think in some ways the forums have created detailers who work on nice cars, and do all the steps, but have created less than stellar work. They simply don't have the experience (although they have all the knowledge) that is necessary.

Also, as opposed to medicine, where a procedure based approach will work the great majority of the time, every car is truly different. There is a certain artistic aspect to detailing that requires experience to hone.

So in the world of detailing, it matters if a detailer has had 30 years experience instead of 25 or 20, for a class that takes 5 days. And in medicine, it takes 10 years to train a teacher of medical students whom it takes 7 to 10 years to train.

In the world of detailing it is completely up to the individual. In Medicine you have to satisfy certain requirements and standards.

I have met many detailers who have 10-30 years experience but my estimation only have 3 months of actual experience x 40-120. In medicine the physicians are required (by standards) to attend courses that further their education and advance their knowledge. You have to pay to play.

In detailing you get a lot of guys who learned misinformation 30 years ago, who are still doing it wrong 30 years later, but brag about their experience. People's expectations about how a car should look are so low that you often them see them driving brand new cars that look terrible, with their friends bragging about the shiny new paint.

I am so totally rambling, I know. I know detailing is an art, and I want to know the science of it. And because unlike drugs, the composition of detailing chemicals is not publicly available, that would be hard to do.

I have been on a four year journey to learn more and more about how and why this stuff works, for the sake of personal knowledge and because I believe it is necessary for me to be the best detailer I can be.

[Mary S]

Re: Chemistry degree required

What an amazing (and different) perspective on something I have never given much thought to. I have no doubt that many detailers would be far less equipped with knowledge (myself included) if it wasn't for the advent of detailing forums. That said there is a lot of misinformation that also spreads like wildfire.

Medicine as a whole benefits greatly from open communication and shared advances, probably for several reasons:

People's lives are at stake- In detailing most (with rare exception) mistakes can be fixed.

Medicine is regulated by governing bodies- Want to be a doctor? Here is what you must do. Want to be a nurse? You must complete these standards. With detailing, a guy can go to Target, and twenty three dollars later he is a detailer.. There is no governing body, no regulations, and no concrete definition of the word detailer.

Collective geniuses, who have all suprased certain recommendations, formulate procedures that work in most cases on most humans. However, like cars, not all humans are created equally, and some situations require expertise. Performing heart surgery on an infant who has a unique and complex birth defect is beyond the scope of most heart surgeons, for example.

There is also a hiearchy in detailing. Can you go to a school for 2-5 days and learn how to clean most cars pretty good, and not mess too much stuff up? Sure, and if you work hard, market yourself correctly, and offer competitve pricing, you will likely make a decent living.

Should you be correcting original paint on a 6 million dollar automobile at this level? No.

Would detailing in as a whole benefit from more open communication? I don't know honestly. I think in some ways the forums have created detailers who work on nice cars, and do all the steps, but have created less than stellar work. They simply don't have the experience (although they have all the knowledge) that is necessary.

Also, as opposed to medicine, where a procedure based approach will work the great majority of the time, every car is truly different. There is a certain artistic aspect to detailing that requires experience to hone.




In the world of detailing it is completely up to the individual. In Medicine you have to satisfy certain requirements and standards.

I have met many detailers who have 10-30 years experience but my estimation only have 3 months of actual experience x 40-120. In medicine the physicians are required (by standards) to attend courses that further their education and advance their knowledge. You have to pay to play.

In detailing you get a lot of guys who learned misinformation 30 years ago, who are still doing it wrong 30 years later, but brag about their experience. People's expectations about how a car should look are so low that you often them see them driving brand new cars that look terrible, with their friends bragging about the shiny new paint.





I have been on a four year journey to learn more and more about how and why this stuff works, for the sake of personal knowledge and because I believe it is necessary for me to be the best detailer I can be.

There are many forces in play that make detailing and medical science vastly different, and I think the biggest might be that it can be learned fairly easily, at least the basics, and you can get into the field with relatively little capital compared to other businesses. So when someone discovers an innovation to make the process faster or better, one may not be inclined to just share the information but rather make it a trade secret to give you a competitive edge. Medical professionals even in the same specialty don't think of eachother as competitors but rather as colleagues. And the advancement of medical science is almost totally dependent upon building off of the accomplishments of others so the technology and the profession as a whole moves forward.

The science and the technology of the detailing chemicals is advancing, but it is hard to comprehend. And it is hard to know what is frivolous. Like a special fluid specifically for cleaning buffing pads, or a special fluid specifically for refreshing microfiber, is it really high-tech or is it some simple chemical we can find around the house?

It would be about as hard for one of us to try to test everything that is out there as it would be for doctors to do their own clinical trial for every drug that is being sold; well, almost. Or worse, what if doctors had to develop drugs too? Even in the days when only naturally occurring remedies were used, the knowledge of how to use them was passed along and didn't need to be reinvented.

I wish I understood more about the chemistry of products and I realize that probably won't happen, and I am going to end up destroying things along the way. It isn't like that hasn't already happened. It is a good thing lives aren't involved most of the time. I will certainly do my best to try to understand how things work, at least on a broad scale.

[Mary S]

Re: Chemistry degree required

I just wanted to add one comment. The course to be qualified to do what I do as a medical transcriptionist is about a 1-1/2 to 2-year course. I had to study anatomy, physiology, laboratory and diagnostic medicine, pharmacology, medical terminology in all the body systems, Greek and Latin prefixes and suffixes, all this in addition to the practical part of learning to understand what a doctor who could be from anywhere in the world talking at any speed is saying.

I worked as a Nursing Assistant when I was 18 and I had a 3-month course plus a 2-week on the job course at the hospital to do that. You have to be certified in Missouri to be a CNA, with a course about that long (it wasn't required in Tennessee at the time).

So I have to say, no, I don't think you can learn everything you need to know about detailing in 2 to 5 days, other than really how to work under the supervision of someone who has more expertise. Just as you learn the anatomy and physiology of the human body in all the medical professions and paraprofessions, more knowledge of the chemistry and physics of the surfaces that a detailer applies chemicals or abrasive actions to should be understood in a way that takes longer than a week, for detailing to surpass being a trade and skill and become a profession that could grow collectively. Which lacquers and clear coats then to understand would be pretty much all of them. And if there aren't processes by which these can be detected and identified, that is an innovation that should be developed and available to the detailing profession as a whole for it to advance, because empiric methods, try this, try that, may work but aren't always practical. This is the part of the profession that now requires the most experience, learning how to recognize what paint is going to react how, because you have worked on so many different paints before (and I mean clear coat too when I say paint).