Tinted Clear coat or single stage paint?

[wesleyoh]

Hi All

I read through Mike's article about tinted clear coat, single stage paint and clear coat. My car back panel got resprayed 2 weeks ago.

The funny thing is that the upper panel has red paint transfer on my surbuff pad but the bottom half panel doesn't have.

I asked the painter who did my car and he did not was to give me a definite answer.

I am wondering if the top half of the panel is tinted clear coat or they just spray it with a single stage paint.

But why must they have to different kinds of paint system for one panel? Anyone can tell from my pad below?

[wesleyoh]

Re: Tinted Clear coat or single stage paint?

I used ultimate compound with 4inch surbuff. When I used ultimate polish with yellow meguiars polishing pad, the red transfer was very minimal.

[Michael Stoops]

Re: Tinted Clear coat or single stage paint?

It would be extremely odd for a painter to use two different paint systems on a single car, let alone on a single panel. It makes no sense from an economic standpoint or from an organized workflow standpoint. The only time such a difference might occur, however, is if the bottom of this particular panel is made up of a composite that needs a flex agent in the paint and the upper section does not. But even then, both should be painted with a color coat and a clear so you still shouldn't have any color transfer. Unless he painted color and clear on the top first, then color and clear with a flex agent on the bottom section last and got color overspray onto the top half. That still seems like an odd way to go (and really poor masking of the upper portion of the panel) but doing that would cause you to transfer color to your pad on just the upper part of the panel.

As for getting less transfer with UP and a yellow polishing pad than you did with UC on the Surbuf simply because the UC/Surbuf combo is much more aggressive. Of course, if the paint went down the way we speculated above it would also follow that UC/Surbuf removed most of the overspray and there wasn't much left for UP/yellow foam to remove after that.

So, did you notice any roughness to the paint on the upper half? Does the color match on both sections of the panel? Is the gloss, orange peel, etc the same on both sections? Is the lower section even a composite material like we're speculating?

[wesleyoh]

Re: Tinted Clear coat or single stage paint?

It would be extremely odd for a painter to use two different paint systems on a single car, let alone on a single panel. It makes no sense from an economic standpoint or from an organized workflow standpoint. The only time such a difference might occur, however, is if the bottom of this particular panel is made up of a composite that needs a flex agent in the paint and the upper section does not. But even then, both should be painted with a color coat and a clear so you still shouldn't have any color transfer. Unless he painted color and clear on the top first, then color and clear with a flex agent on the bottom section last and got color overspray onto the top half. That still seems like an odd way to go (and really poor masking of the upper portion of the panel) but doing that would cause you to transfer color to your pad on just the upper part of the panel.

As for getting less transfer with UP and a yellow polishing pad than you did with UC on the Surbuf simply because the UC/Surbuf combo is much more aggressive. Of course, if the paint went down the way we speculated above it would also follow that UC/Surbuf removed most of the overspray and there wasn't much left for UP/yellow foam to remove after that.

So, did you notice any roughness to the paint on the upper half? Does the color match on both sections of the panel? Is the gloss, orange peel, etc the same on both sections? Is the lower section even a composite material like we're speculating?

So, did you notice any roughness to the paint on the upper half? Does the color match on both sections of the panel? Is the gloss, orange peel, etc the same on both sections? Is the lower section even a composite material like we're speculating?[/QUOTE]

There is no roughness on the paint on the upper half. Colour matches for both sections of the panel. The only difference I can see is the gloss on a small section on the upper panel. Just below the letter

[wesleyoh]

Re: Tinted Clear coat or single stage paint?

arg.. my post got cut off halfway.

[wesleyoh]

Re: Tinted Clear coat or single stage paint?

Just below the letter "U and S" and above the door handle, the gloss is not very clear. It also have a whitish effect and paint seem not even.

I managed to remove 100% of the swirls for the lower section but only manged to remove 70% for the upper section as I'm afraid that the more paint i remove, there might be a high chance that the colour becomes 2 tones.










Pictures before the accident. (damaged is on the right panel of the boot door, but I got them to respray both sides.)

[wesleyoh]

Re: Tinted Clear coat or single stage paint?

so is it a base coat? or tinted clear?

[Michael Stoops]

Re: Tinted Clear coat or single stage paint?

It's a bit difficult to see any difference in these images, and whether this is a tinted clear, an overspray situation that has now been corrected, or a single stage paint is hard to tell. Here in the US we almost never see single stage paints used on modern cars any more due to tightening regulations. Whether or not single stage is still common in Singapore is another matter. At the end of the day, though, if you're not happy with the work done you really should talk to the body shop that did the work. We know you said they weren't very forthcoming with answers, but if this was repair work covered by insurance then the insurance carrier would be (or at least should be) interested to know that you're not pleased with the outcome.