About us
About Five North
A Penang workshop that would rather turn a job away than rush it — and a standard we can defend in front of a paint depth gauge.
Why we work the way we do
Five North exists because most detailing shops in Penang do the same three things — wash, polish, wax, repeat — and never measure the result. What changes everything is a paint depth gauge.
Once you can measure clear coat, you stop treating polishing as a cosmetic step and start treating it as a finite resource. A factory panel gives you roughly 35–55 microns of clear coat. A heavy compounding pass can take 3–5 microns. Do the arithmetic and you realise most cars get three or four serious corrections in their entire life before the clear coat is too thin to protect the colour underneath.
That single fact reorganised everything. It is why we measure before we polish, why we do a test spot to find the least aggressive combination that works rather than the fastest, and why we will sometimes tell a customer their car does not need correction at all.
What we will not do
We do not run automatic brush washes. We do not use fillers or glazes to hide swirls before a coating, because they wash out in eight weeks and take the coating's bond with them. We do not quote a coating price before seeing the paint. And we do not sell "10-year coatings" — no coating survives ten years in Penang without maintenance, and pretending otherwise is how this industry earned its reputation.
The bay
Coating is applied in a sealed, positively pressured bay with filtered air and colour-corrected LED inspection lighting at three angles. Dust settling into a curing coating is a permanent defect. In an open-air workshop in Penang, that is not a risk — it is a certainty.
Cars cure indoors under IR lamps for a minimum of 24 hours before we will release them. That is why our lead time is longer than the shop down the road, and it is not a step we will compress for anyone.
At a glance
Standards
Four commitments on every job
Measured, not guessed
Paint depth readings before and after correction, recorded on your job sheet and handed to you at collection.
Written warranty
A physical document with terms, exclusions and duration. If a shop will not put it in writing, it is not a warranty.
Real cure time
Minimum 24 hours indoors under IR. We will not hand back a coated car the same evening, whatever the deadline.
Honest downgrades
If your car does not need what you asked for, we will say so and quote the cheaper thing instead.
Answers
About Five North
What kind of workshop is Five North?
A small, deliberately small coating workshop. Every car is handled by a technician who has done this for years, not a rotating pool of casual labour — which is why we cap the number of cars in the bay rather than stacking bookings.
Are your technicians certified?
Our lead technicians hold manufacturer application certifications for the coating and PPF systems we install, which is a requirement for us to issue the manufacturer-backed warranty. Certification matters less than the hours, though — the difference between a good and a poor correction is entirely in the operator's feel for the machine.
Do you use branded coatings or unbranded product?
Branded, manufacturer-supplied product with batch traceability, and we will show you the bottle and the batch number. Unbranded bulk coating decanted into unmarked bottles is common in this market and it is impossible to warrant. If a workshop will not show you what is going on your car, that tells you what you need to know.
Come and inspect the bay before you book
You are welcome to visit, see a car mid-correction, and look at the inspection lighting yourself. Most customers who do that book on the spot.