Soft / Hard Paint?

[lozi_murias]

Hi everyone,

I've been reading through PB's detailing threads, and in a lot of them Rich refers to things like "Honda paint is soft as ice cream" and "rock solid VW paint" etc.... How do you find this sort of thing out? - For example, how can I find out how hard / soft / thick / thin the Ford metallic paint is? How much of a difference does it make to cleaning routines?

I feel like a bit of a pillock not knowing this, so someone pleeeease give me an answer! :oops:

[Polished_Bliss_Detailing]

Its just general knowledge amongst the "detailing community" (lol) that certain car manufacturers have harder and thicker clear coats than others. i.e the likes of Mercedes,Audi,VW,BMW,SEAT,Porsche tend to be very hard and quite thick (around 150/160 microns of paint when new)then you have the likes of Ford,volvo,vauxhall's in the middle and generally the jap cars like Honda, Toyota etc have very soft and thin paint (generally around 110/120 microns of paint when new), Ferrari also have one of the softest paints too in my experience..



but you get your exceptions, subaru for instance tends to be quite hard and the Astra Coupe's that are sprayed in Italy are also hard compared to the other vauxhalls, its just something over time that you learn and of course through experience of detailing :)

Re-sprays also come in to play..I did a Honda Civic Type R, one side was soft as i'd expected but the other side was rock hard, turns out that one side had been re-sprayed and the clear coat they had used was much harder than the factory!

obviously, the harder the clear coat, the harder it is to remove defects and swirls, but at the same time its harder to induce defects and vice versa with soft paint.

We use PTG's (paint thickness gauges, pictured below) so we can accurately assess how much paint we have to safely play with during a detail:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v317/Clark_VTR/Cmx531.jpg

These can also tell us whether an original panel has been re-sprayed or if it's had a brand new panel fitted and sprayed :)

The above reading was taken on the bootlid of a mazda mx-5 and as you can see its a very low reading when you consider that it should have around 110 microns at least (clear coat is normally around 1/3rd of the reading as you still have to take primer and the paint into account also), so i could only go at the paint with a very mild compound and pad with the machine otherwise the paint could be burned.


hope that helps :)

[hesslevtr]

do citreons have hard or soft paint

[barrett]

think citroen is in the middle/hard range paul, but wait for the full say from rich / clark

[PolishedBliss]

Fairly hard. If you check out the following link you'll see work Clark did on a VTS. He had to wetsand some severe scratches and use the rotary polisher on the swirls, so from this we can safely say it was very hard indeed. By hand, you are unlikely to be able to fully correct Citroen paint due to it's hardness, and even by machine it can still be hard work...

http://www.polishedbliss.co.uk/acatalog/saxovts.html

:)

[hellonpluto]

By hand, you are unlikely to be able to fully correct Citroen paint due to it's hardness, and even by machine it can still be hard work...

Tell me about it! LOL

[barrett]

That saxo looks like an excellent job by clark!! I saw that a week or two back when you launched the new detailing section.

Get the report online clark:wink:

[Polished_Bliss_Detailing]

will put it up now then ;)