Paint Hardness

[Chex]

Hi everyone:

I think this one is a tough one to solve and paint manufacturers never answered me this one....

How do you determine the paint hardness?

Hope you can answer my question and thanks in advance

[Murr1525]

Re: Paint Hardness

It isnt really a measure, just a comparison between different paints.

[Jusadbellum]

Re: Paint Hardness

Murr1525

Surely different paints cure to different hardness, numerous threads talk about how certain paints are harder than others?

Chex: the suggestion that always crops up is try an area first and see if it works...

[Murr1525]

Re: Paint Hardness

There are trends.

German paint can tend to be hard, while Japanese cars seem to have softer paint. Black paint will tend to be softer, while white can be a bit harder.

But it is not as if one paint is "hardness 1" and another is "hardness 9", and then there is a certain procedure for each.

[gorin002]

Re: Paint Hardness

i have a opel corsa its german car we are part of G.M
its silver metalic.is that hard or soft

[Jusadbellum]

Re: Paint Hardness

Murr,

I realise there isn't a hardness scale for particular paints due to many varying factors but I took Chex's question to mean can you test the paint to see how hard it is..

I figured they were looking for a hardness scale to verify their particular paints hardness before attacking it.

How do the various pro detailers out there do it? do you guys just take a guess and try with a machine on a patch and go from there?

[MotorcycleDetailing]

Re: Paint Hardness

From what Mike has said.....Always try the method of least aggression (or something close to it )

So I look at the paint and if it has little to no swirls I use a Polishing pad, dual action polisher and number 80. Medium to Light swirls w8006 pad the polisher and #80....if that don't work go up to #83 then back to #80. Anything over Medium swirls I do the same as with medium to light swirls and try to remove as much swirls as possable without damaging the paint.

If you can feel it with your nail....then touch up paint is the way to go (to do it properly, otherwise try to lower the paint thickness near the scratch and make it less noticable.

Looking at getting a rotary to do Medium swirls up but thats down the track, If I can't fix them with #83 then I do my best and call it aday at that. But I tell my customers, I can remove most of the swirls but the deeper ones might still be there where I have finished. That way they are prepared for the worst and are pleasantly supprised most of the time.

But you can't tell until you try it first.

[Mike Phillips]

Re: Paint Hardness

In a nutshell, no one should be making broad statements about hard and/or soft paint because no one knows how hard or soft the paint is on each car until they go out into the garage and work on it. It is at the point that you bring your hand down on the paint,or a machine and do a little cleaning that you're going to find out if the paint you're working on is hard or soft.

Pretty simple really, if you with your 4 fingers pushing down on an applicator pad with a paint cleaner like ScratchX can remove swirls and scratches with 2-3 applications using perfect technique, then the paint is workable, or polish-able. If you can't then the paint is hard.

Same goes for machine applied paint cleaners or clean/polishes.

You really don't know whether the paint on your car is hard or soft until you go out into your garage and test it to see what can be done. Don't follow the advice of anyone on a forum making broad statements about different models of cars having hard or soft paint, they really shouldn't be doing this disservice to people.

[DaGonz]

Re: Paint Hardness

I have two clients that have identical Honda Accords.

One has paint so "soft" it swirls by looking at it.. the other has paint that is as hard as a rock.

Both cars were made int he same Marysville, Ohio plant just two months apart.

Like Mike said.. you really can't figure out the paintwork until you actually start detailing it.

[Mike Phillips]

Re: Paint Hardness

Like Mike said.. you really can't figure out the paintwork until you actually start detailing it.

Thank you.

Kind of like these two Chrysler 300's, one is a 2005 and one is a 2006, the factory paint on the 2005 buffed completely different than the factory paint on the 2006. We sanded out defects from both cars and the key difference was the sanding marks on the 2005 buffed out quick and easy. The sanding marks on the 2006 didn't want to budge and to remove them we had to invest quite a bit more time as you can only buff small areas for so long before you have to stop and allow the paint to cool down before buffing longer.

Taken from these two threads,

Photos from March 29th Open Garage at Meguiar's! - John's 2005 Chrysler 300

Pictures from Meguiar's Open Garage - August 2nd! - Ella's 2006 Chrysler 300



Here's John's car the 2005 Chrysler 300 and the scratch removal process


John aka Fat Chance, let us do a little wet-sanding on his Chrysler 300 as the hood was hit with an egg and it left some deeper scratches on the hood.




This photo was actually taken after wet-sanding with a backing pad and then using a rotary buffer with a cutting pad and M84 Compound Power Cleaner to remove the sanding marks. We didn't get any pictures of how bad the scratches were before we started but you'll get the idea...




After removing all the lighter scratches from the process above, we then cut up some small pieces of Nikken #2500 grit Finishing Paper to zero in on just the scratches while sanding.






After sanding each of the individual scratches flat, we then removed the sanding marks using the W-7006 Foam Cutting pad with some more M84 Compound Power Cleaner at around 1500 rpm.




We then re-polished the area with a W-8006 Foam Polishing Pad and some M83 Dual Action Cleaner/Polish with the rotary buffer, the re-polished again using M80 Speed Glaze with the G100 and then applied some M21 Synthetic Sealant.

About the only sign of the scratches left was this tiny little residual scratch right here...





And here's Ella's car and the scratch removal process...

Originally posted by fatchance
We had a great time, thanks to the Meg's crew, Mike, Jason and Sean. The hood on Ella C SRT looked amazing when it was finished.

Hi John,

First we would like to thank you for bringing Ella and her car to Meguiar's Garage and allowing us to work on it. As you can see Ella keeps her car in pristine condition!




There were however to very unsightly scratches in the shape of an arc, running from the back of the hood by the windshield all the way to the front of the hood on the passenger's side of the car.

Here's some close-ups of the scratches, while they don't look very deep, they stood out like a sore thumb on an other wise flawless finish.






The paint also had these almost perfect, circular indents throughout the hood as you can see in the below close-up which is actually a section cropped out of the above photo and actual size.




In order to remove these scratches we decided to use a technique called Feather Sanding, where you take a small piece of Meguiar's Nikken Finishing Paper, about the size of a postage stamp, and carefully sand directly over the defect you're trying to remove and feather the edge out until you can no longer see the scratch.

After sanding out the two long arc scratches, we took a photo of the entire hood so you can now see just how long these scratches extended over the passenger's side of the hood and we think most people would agree, that if they owned this car and the finish was otherwise flawless except for two distinct, long scratches in the hood... well you would want them out of the paint also!







The easy part is actually sanding out the scratches, the tricky part is removing the sanding marks!. This however is where Meguiar's excels! We've been creating products that use diminishing abrasives since 1901 and our product have the ability to actually remove defects without instilling defects at the same time and that's the secret to creating flawless, show car finishes!

We would like to note that we think Ella's eyes got a little bigger while watching us sand on the hood of her baby...




After wet-sanding out the defects, we carefully massaged out our sanding marks and then asked Ella to apply some M21 Synthetic Sealant. Here are the results...

[Mike Phillips]

Re: Paint Hardness

Big picture...

You don't know how hard or soft the paint is on any car until you go out into your garage and actualy start to work on it

[Mike Phillips]

Re: Paint Hardness

***Bump***