Painting or doing minor touch-ups to your car’s paint requires talent, patience, and practice to do well. Given the abundance of quite straightforward yet spectacular paint touch-up techniques available, it is getting simpler for regular people to learn this skill.
For those who don’t know, “blending” is a technique where you aid in perfecting the transition between the remainder of your car’s existing paintwork and the freshly touched-up Auto paint Australia over a damaged region. Even if the new and old paints are the exact same colour, they cannot match properly. The texture or shading can be a little wrong. This won’t usually be overly evident.
But occasionally, even if you’re just touching up a tiny crack or chip, it might be a sight for sore eyes to see this one particular location on your automobile. The tiniest colour variation, whether darker or lighter, will be extremely noticeable. Alternatively, it’s possible that the paint came from a different batch or mix and is not the precise shade you were hoping for. Because of this, blending is a crucial component of automotive paints.
Blending: What Is It?
Let’s say you had a freshly installed bumper on your automobile repaired, and you had it shipped to a body or paint shop to be repainted. The painter(s) will do their best to blend the colour and appearance of the paint they will use only on the bumper with the rest of the car’s fascia throughout the blending process. Thus, this is simply an optical illusion that makes it appear as though they are two separate, cohesive parts.
It appears as though the bumper matches the surrounding body parts’ colour and finish, such as the fenders, bonnet, and so forth. This is a standard procedure among reputable paint businesses; why not have one or two panels painted instead of having the customer spend thousands of dollars painting the complete car? Given how difficult it is to correctly apply paints, this is a significant saving.
The Roots Of Imperfections
For instance, the automaker may have purchased paints from many vendors and businesses. Even though they all agreed on the same general tone, there are some minute variances. Or maybe the rest of your car’s old, undisturbed paint has weathered over time and looks more worn than the brand-new, newly applied touch-up.
There are also some more factors that come into play while applying paint, which may explain why the freshly placed paint on your car doesn’t match the old paint.
- When using metallic paints, you can aim the spray gun at an awkward angle, which will cause the metallic flakes to be distributed to the remaining unfixed paint in an unexpected pattern.
- The amount of paint used and how it spreads across the surface of your car may vary depending on the pressure of the spray gun or container you’re using to apply it.
- The paint will eventually be dispersed across the surface, changing how it will appear, depending on how far away you are pointing the spray gun or can from the surface of the car.
- When painting, temperature and humidity play a crucial role since they can affect how quickly or slowly freshly applied or touched-up paint dries, creating a unique finish from the rest.
The Method of Blending
Now that we’ve cleared up the background information on paint blending, let’s move on to how we can practise this on our car to make the paint look as uniform as possible. Let this serve as a reminder that you cannot easily blend touch-up paint using a paint pen or brush, which are the most popular applicants, unless you are exceptionally talented and have experience with paint.
Both of these have the potential to make the touched-up paint appear darker, and after the clear coat is applied, this will be accentuated. So for this one, we’ll use a spray gun or spray can.
Step 1: Tape off the regions around the damaged area to prevent blending otherwise flawless paint. Using masking tape and perhaps some old newspapers, create a zone 2 feet in diameter around the damaged area.
Step 2: Use sandpaper to scuff up some of the paint in that area that will shortly be blended. Since we only need to remove the top layer of paint, we don’t want to use coarse sandpaper in this situation. Use 2,000 grit sandpaper for the task, and take care to stay away from the margins of the 2-foot space.
Step 3: Now is a good opportunity to clean up the already-sanded area to reduce the possibility of pollutants contaminating the touch-up paint later. Don’t use wax; instead, wash your car with some water and gentle auto shampoo. After that, carefully dry your car off with a fresh microfiber towel.
Step 4: The bottom basecoat layer can now be applied over the area you want to blend. Use a consistent back-and-forth motion with the spray gun as you apply the paint. Begin painting from the edge of the repaired area and gradually reduce the amount of paint you spray until you have covered a distance of 1 foot, at which point you should only be applying a thin mist. This is done to make it difficult for your eyes to distinguish where the paint ends and where it starts.
Step 5: Complete two to three layers (or coats) of the basecoat before beginning to paint. Wait until each layer is completely dry before applying the next one, and so on. After completing all the layers, let the car unattended so that it can settle and cure for the night.
Step 6: Check to see if the basecoat and the other paint have mixed well. You can proceed to the top clearcoat layer if everything checks out well. To give your car its glossy and shiny finish, use the same technique as before to apply two thin coatings of clearcoat. After that, let it cure for two days.
Step 7: Buff out all the flecks, blobs, impurities, etc., because the blended paint could still have some defects. Wet sand the blended region after submerging 1,500 grit sandpaper in water. Rewet the sandpaper as you go, and work slowly and uniformly. Then, you can switch to 2,000 grit sandpaper, which is finer, to wet sand the surface once more and level it out.
Step 8: Wash your automobile once again and check to see whether the blending worked by shining a light on it. You might go ahead and attempt to wet sand the blended area once more if there is still a contrast between the old and new paint.