Goodbye Geocities

I heard that Yahoo is shutting down GeoCities this week. Back in 1999 Geocities was one of two or three places you could put up a free website. Good bye Geocities good bye The Paint Professor. Anyone recognize the Professor? I was trying for my dear friend the late Jim Wallen.

Here is a screenshot I took today

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Matrix MPB-9000 Black

Here at Allen Paint we sell Sherwin Williams Ultra 7000 as our premier line. The Ultra 7000 is the basecoat I recommend for exact matches on newer cars it is excellent paint and I love it. It is not cheap but for exact matches stands up to any paint line. For complete paint jobs we sell Sherwin's economy line Dimension not designed for matching but it's pretty close in most colors. One of the places it falls down is black. It just isn't deep enough it always looks just a little brown. Kinda disappointing
We do however Have 2 other lines of paint Matrix and Wanda.
Today I would like to tell you about the Matrix MPB-9000 this is a factory black base coat that is deep and dark and rich and very very black. That and it's reasonably priced we sell it for 128.95 a gallon. We also pour off quarts pints and half pints.
That said it is not really suitable for matching I looked up some formulas this morning Dodge PX8 has a little bit of yellow oxide and a little white. Ford UA black was similar. Mercedes Benz uses a little blue the point is this not for matching but if your painting a complete this is the ticket.



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

What is the right gun to use?

This post comes in response to to a readers question. Donald Butler from Houston is restoring a Jeep and keeps a video blog of his progress.
Donald asked what is the best gun for doing a metallic finish for a base coat clear coat paint job?
In an ideal world I would like a whole arsenal of guns. I would like a 1.4 HVLP gun for base coat and a 1.3 RP (reduced pressure non hvlp for the clear), a 1.8 for urethane primer a 2.2 for those times when I need to use a polyester primer and a detail gun for shooting smaller projects and doorjambs.
The 1.4 HVLP gives the best color match and the 1.3(or smaller) RP lays down the clear the best. Primer guns need a larger oriface to lay down the heavier material.
Alas I can't afford all of them. I get by with a 1.4 HVLP for both base and clear a 1.0 detail gun and a 1.8 primer gun
There have been manufactures over the years that have made guns with interchangable air caps and I've tried a couple and have never been very impressed. They are compromises and just don't seem to work out well. To do it right youo would have ot change out the air cap, fluid nozzle and needle. Doing that you've probubly spent enough money to buy a new gun.
By far the most important thing is to match your gun to your compressor. This is about air consumption. Guns need a critical volume of air to operate correctly if you spend a lot of money on a good gun that requires 13CFM (cubic feet per minute) to operate and your compressor can only deliver 8 CFM it will not operate correctly and you will be disappointed.




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Invisible Car

This from Telegraph.co.uk Art student Sara Watson a 22-year-old student at the University of Central Lancashire spray painted a battered Skoda Fabia to match the car park and entrance to her art studio.
Visit the Telegraph site for other views of the car






This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Tips for using bodyfiller

Polyester body filler, Bondo, (a registered trade mark that has taken on the generic title)  pasta, or just plastic filler, call it what you want we all use it. There are economy fillers, premium fillers the fine folks at USC U. S. Chemicals & Plastics  have given use a list of tips to better body filler

• Outdated hardener is the #1 cause of problems. DO NOT use hardener over 1 year old
• Do Not over catalyze 
• Always knead the cream hardener tube prior to use
• Do Not whip body filler
• Do Not put filler on paint shaker
• Using coarse grit abrasives like 24 & 36 grit wastes time material and slows production use 80 grit and you will have a better job with fewer pinholes
• Apply thin layers using a flat spreader working the filler into the scratches to promote adhesion and force out air 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Pearl Paint

 When asked for advise about pearl paint the first thing I have to do is narrow down what kind of pearl we are talking about. There are three kinds of pearl paint jobs. Pearl is an ingredient used in automotive paint. Pearls are used to add a sparkle to paint much like metallic. There are dozens of colors available dark and light blues, greens, golds, and reds but also slivers and bronze and copper.

 Automotive manufactures will use just a pinch or 3 or more different pearls to add life to the paint. With modern base coat systems pearl coat will lay down as nice as solid colors. One note of caution the more coats of pearl you put on the darker the color gets. So when doing a repair leave a panel open so you don't put more coats on than necessary to achieve the color you are after. 

The second use of pearl is on thi stage paint jobs like the Cadillac or Lexis white pearls. These involve a white ground coat then a pearl mid coat then a clear coat. Once again it's critical that you have the same number of coats on the whole project.

 The third kind of pearl is used in custom painting to give a color shift for instance a white car with blue pearl mixed into the second coat of clear. I don't mix it into the first coat because I want the pearl to be suspended above the base. I fog on this coat then clean my gun and mix up some more clear to give it a couple more coats. SEM makes eight nice liquid pearls and Old School Flake makes about 20 powder pearls. How much to use? Well that's an artistic decision, I shoot a lot of test panels and take the panels out into the sun before I decide how much to use on the car or bike I'm painting.

 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Hard times for some opportunity for others

These can be hard times for paint stores.  These can be hard times for your customers, especially if your customers are big body shops at the dealership level. These can also be times of great opportunity. There are plenty of small shops that have had no slow down in their business at all. 

I have given this quite a bit of thought for the paint store owner and the paint store counter men and women, you need to take more time slow down and give the small shop owner and the backyard warrior more service. In the end it's better to have 40 small shops than 8 big ones.

For the shop owner you need to be more agile I was talking to one of my customers today. Al of Exclusive Image here in Denver and he has been having a good no a very good winter. He does some dealer work, some rental car work and complete paint jobs on higher end cars;  Bmw's Mercedes, Chrysler 300s. He sets his customers up with custom tires and rims and really treats them right. He's honest, detail oriented and doesn't cut corners it has a given him a great word of mouth following.    

 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.