3 part paint system

[Lincsdiver]

Morning all, car is going in for a detail on weekend and has a couple of scratches (paint is bursting blue metallic) Volvo have just said that it’s a 3 part system required (paint, top coat and enamel). Is this correct as most places on the Internet seem to specify a 2 part system. It seems excessive to have a top coat and an enamel just for some scratches... obviously if this is needed I will purchase all three. Thank you for any advice

[canis]

Okay, I'm a bit out of date, and honestly I haven't the faintest idea about enamel. But I might be able to alleviate some misconceptions.

Normally a car has a basecoat (the colour) and a clearcoar (the laquer). Where enamel fits into this I haven't the faintest idea, must be some new-fangled technology.

The reason a scratch will need painting is because you cannot polish colour which isn't there! People often talk about polishing out scratches. This is a myth left over from the cellulose days, where the top surface of paint was actually paint, no laquer. A scratch which was very (VERY) slight could be "polished out" providing it wasn't so deep it broke through to the primer underneath. Today, with all cars being coated in laquer, same applies, if the scratch is slight enough, you can "polish out" the scratch. But here's the rub - you aren't "polishing out" a scratch at all, what you're actually doing is abrading away the surrounding paintwork until it's all smooth. Effectively you've taken off a layer of paint as deep as the scratch, just over a larger area. In reality, hardly any scratches can be polished out properly, and painting is the only solution.

Any paintwork on any car will require the entire panel painting. The only exception to this rule is where panels are joined, the obvious example being the rear quarter panel and the roof. Nobody wants to paint a roof if they can avoid it, so special "fade-out" thinners are available, and don't work terribly well to be honest. In the end, there's only so thin you can go. A fade-out, sometimes called a blow-in, will bloom after a while. You can keep polishing it, but eventually the edge will show. This is why re-sprays exist, because there's just not really any solution to dry edges.

It's tempting to think of a spray mist of paint as getting progressively thinner to infinity. Physically, this is impossible of course. There's no such thing as infinity, there comes a point at which the properties of the material (paint, laquer) can't be stretched any further. There's dust. There's blobs. There's surface tension. There's a lot of stuff that can happen to a droplet of paint on it's way through the air before meeting a panel - you just can't fade out indefinately.

So that's why you'll need the entire panel painting. It's not a con.

But i'm clueless about this enamel though. Enamel??? Really???

[christheancient]

I know that I'm an old fogey that lives in the past.

But...

Both myself and my neighbour have had very good results with Chips-Away!

And they have to do a good job coz if they don't, or get complained about, they lose their franchise that cost them quite a bit of money... and out of a job! I even thought of going down that path, once upon a time, but could not afford the training and franchise fees!

And I know of some (reputable) car sales places that use them to get 2nd-hand cars immaculate and ready for sale.

[Ian21401]

Originally Posted by christheancient

I know that I'm an old fogey that lives in the past.

But...

Both myself and my neighbour have had very good results with Chips-Away!

And they have to do a good job coz if they don't, or get complained about, they lose their franchise that cost them quite a bit of money... and out of a job! I even thought of going down that path, once upon a time, but could not afford the training and franchise fees!

And I know of some (reputable) car sales places that use them to get 2nd-hand cars immaculate and ready for sale.

We used a local “Chips Away” a few years ago on my daughter’s black V50 for a car park scrape and associated damage to RNS plastic bumper. We were very satisfied and impressed with the results.