The Use of Spray Guns in Car Painting

Car paint is both the perfect visual finishing touch and an excellent guard against rust and corrosion – a slender, but tough and thorough, layer that covers the mild steel sheet metal of which most cars are constructed.
From the brilliant, silky metallic sheen of a car painted with polychromatic metallics, to the glossy depths of a kandy-painted vehicle, to the strong, clean reds, blues, greens, blacks, and yellows of many factory-painted cars, the numerous variations of modern paint, these tints give the highways of the modern world an almost festive variety of colors and offer both the professional and amateur painting enthusiast the chance to create many different custom paint schemes.

Key to making these paints look their best and provide the utmost protection is the way that they are delivered to the car’s surface during painting. Most modern paints are applied in layers no more than a few mils thick – the “twenty hand-rubbed coats” of yore have gone the way of white sidewalls and lofty fins. Painting more thickly, it has been discovered, causes the paint to peel or flake away, partly due to upper layers of paint shrinking more than the lower layers, causing the paint to contract and pull upwards.

The challenge is to provide full and adequate coverage with such a slender coating of paint – the parameters are narrow, and although there is slight room for variation, the method adopted for delivering the paint to the bare metal needs to be precise enough to fall within these restricted tolerances and furnish the results that are needed. Slopping paint on with a brush or roller – as anyone familiar with brush and roller work will know – results in spatters, runs, and thick places, and although these can be corrected, finding and correcting them is a time-consuming process.

The answer to this problem is the modern pneumatic spray gun. Blasting paint out of a nozzle on a jet of pressurized air, which is enough to both reduce the paint to a cloud of tiny droplets and to direct these droplets onto the car’s surface in a vertically flattened cone, these tools are ideal for creating the necessary even layer over the vehicle’s sheet metal. A pneumatic spray gun is powered by a compressor, and care must be taken to acquire both the type of spray gun and the type of compressor that are needed to get the job done correctly every time.

One of the most important concepts in choosing a spray gun is whether it is a regular type or a high volume low pressure (HVLP) device. Regular spray guns are the most familiar type, with a paint cup beneath the nozzle which relies on air pressure to blast the paint out of the cup as well as onto the metal. HVLP spray guns, by contrast, mount the paint cup above the nozzle, relying on gravity feed to cause paint to flow into the airstream and be carried forth onto the car. Although relatively new, these guns are often preferred because they waste far less paint as overspray, and so help to conserve both your money and the environment. carnauba wax products is important these days as most mag wheels have a clear coating on them and if you use the wrong cleaner this clear coating will be removed.