Probably one of the most time-consuming and painstaking things that you will ever do to a car that you care about dearly is repaint it. Even the mere concept of having a vehicle repainted causes people to grit their teeth in fear. The reason is because when vehicles are painted at the factory, it is applied in most cases with a dunk tank. The dunk tank concept takes the empty shell of a body and dips it through multiple steps of liquid material including metal preparation, primer, paint color, and then clearcoat. The latter steps in many cases are applied by robots through a high tech spray gun apparatus.
So when people start talking about repainting their cars they quickly realize that there are going to be places in the vehicle that will never be repainted according to factory specifications. So what happens is people didn’t choose to merely cover the exterior, or visible to the eye areas to bring the paint back to, or as close to it as possible factory look.
However more commonly, repainting of vehicles usually happens in small areas. For example: Collisions are a very common reason why vehicles have to be repainted in small areas. Let’s say that you had a small fender bender and the body shop has since repaired all of the bumpers or metal panels on your vehicle and the time has come for them to now repaint your car. One of the things that you will be advised of if your vehicle has special paint color is one that has spent a lot of time in the sun, is that there is a slight chance your paint may not match perfectly
In situations like this, any good body shop will “blend” the paint and with adjacent areas.
What this technique does is fade in or feather the paint over the adjacent areas so that there is not a clear line between the old paint and the new paint. This is very common in most body shops and a good paint technician can fade in your paint so that the untrained eye will not be able to discern where the old paint began and the new paint started.
When choosing a body shop or doing any small amount of paint repair yourself, it is important to keep in mind the fading problem, and the reality that paint is made in batches, and sometimes those batches vary from lot to lot. This is especially common problem for people who buy touch up paint from the dealer only to find that the touch up paint is different in color than the car they own.
This again is another example of why it’s important to understand and apply when possible, the fading technique.
Tags: fender bender, old paint, paint color, paint technician, special paint