Hi guys, just my 2 cents worth. I have been painting cars as an amateur since I was a teenager and I am close to retirement now. In the last 10 years I have done sheetmetal and paint restoration work on 5 or 6 cars for other people. about 6 years ago I switched to base/clear technology mostly on the urging of a close friend who was in the business. The base/clear does take longer to apply than a single stage paint but does not take particularly more skill. But it does take a bit more knowledge base of product because of the variances in product and the incompatability of some. The base/clear does tend to come out abit shinier than the single stage paints if it is finished and polished correctly. For that reason many people don't like to use base/clear on collector cars because they just think it doesn't look quite right. I guess they are rather right on that account. Yet a very well prepared single stage arylic enamel paint shown at Pebbles Beach would be quite shiny as well. Although the acrylic enamel would not hold its shine (without maintenance) as well. And there is the big difference, Base/clear paint holds its shine VERY well if finished properly. That is why all your new cars look so good for so long. And Base/clear will withstand the elements and everthing else in its environment better than anything else to date. Base clear is labor intensive to apply. It takes many coats of base colour to build up the proper film needed to make the colour cover to the consistency to have the proper colour expected. Then the clear coat is applied with at least 2 coats sometimes more. This is many go arounds the car before the actual painting processes is finished. Most shops do not want to apply single stage paints any more because they are set up to handle base/clear in every tool and at every step. Even their spraying people have narrowed their application skills to the technique of spraying base/clear. A technician who sprays predominantly base/clear would not be as proficient at single stage arylic enamels. And the ablity to guaranty a quality paint job with a high level finish of acrylic enamels would be riskier for a shop today. To get the enamel to lay out perfectly is difficult. But when spraying base/clear you have many points in the application steps to make adjustments in paint, or process if necessary. So shops want to stay with what they know and what they do the most of. Baseclear is much easier to blend with when making a repair. In acrylic enamel when blending paint you have to be very careful not only in the colour match but that the laying on of the paint flows very near if not exactly as the original paint flowed out. the pigment laying on the surface is noticeable. Different paint mix, thinners, air pressure, humidity, or even a different spray gun will affect the differences in the way the paint is laid out on the surface. even with hardeners, etc. added to single stage acrylic enamels, to fine tune and finish the finished surface to try to mask the blending is hard. Arcrylic enamels have to be well cured and hard to finish properly. I painted my corvette 20 years ago with single stage acrylic enamel in Red. Five years ago it was hit in the front end and i had to make repairs. I paint the front end of the car with base/clear, and blended the colour across the doors. Now the back half of the corvette is still the 20 yr old acrylic enamel and front end is base clear. You absolutely can not see where I blended it across the doors. I could lay the base red on so smoothly that you can not see where is stops and the acrylic enamel starts. the arcylic enamel was very smooth from years of buffing and waxing. And I can immediately make the clear coat as smooth as I want it by the degree I wet sand it and buff it. So I could match the texture and quality as well as the colour to what ever degree i wanted. Now days I sometimes (in the spring) buff the rear of the corvette's arylic enamel so as to keep it shiny to match the front of
the car. So the base clear is totally enduring and easily adjusted if necessay. Adjustable when being applied, and also later when repairing and matching. And the shine will last forever when finished properly.
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