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Ok ... so just to recap: You have found the Brightside is higher gloss than Tremclad? And more durable?

Thanks!!



Yes and most likely yes.

Yes. Any polyurathane paint is going to be automatically more glossy and shiny than an enamel That is simply a matter of their chemical characteristics. In order to get the enamel based paint up to a high gloss and shiny appearance you MUST go through the wetsanding, compoundings, polishing and waxing stages. Just remember that you can take any rock off the street and if you polish it enough it can achieve a high state of gloss and shine.

Whereas the polyurathane paint is something like painting with liquid plastic. The carrier for a polyurathane are basically like liquid plastic when painted. Hence the reason it has quite a shine and gloss just by being painted on.

But as I have mentioned, you can take the polyurathane to a higher degree of shine and gloss by going through the wetsanding, compounding, polishing and waxing stages of the process.

As for the question about durability... it is my opinion that a polyurathane is more durable then an enamel. There is a chemical structure reason for this which would support that opinion... but the easiest way to explain it to someone so that they are comfortable with that opinion is this : Enamel based paints are one of the earliest known types of paints. Over the years there has been an evoloution to improve upon the chemical structure of enamel based paints. In the world of enamel based paints you get what you pay for. This means that there are high quality and expensive enamel paints that reflect the latest chemical compounds and there are cheap enamel paints that use the minimum standards in their chemical construction. In something that folks may be more familiar with... there is a wide array of tee shirts made in the world.. or blue jeans for that example. And yet we all know that cheap jeans and cheap tee shirts don't last long. Yet there are more expensive jeans and tee shirts that just can't be killed - they last forever. Then of course we have ultra-high priced jeans and tee- shirts where you are now paying for the name of the product rather than just the quality that went into the manufacture of the product.

Now... back to paint for a second. Polyurathanes were developed by the paint chemist to evolve the old enamels into something better. They were aiming for easier application, longer durability and any other improvements that would make the polyurathane paints a superior product to the enamels. So those chemist would have been comparing their polyurathane products against the best of the enamels. There would be little point trying to develop a new product to be marketed against the cheaper type enamels. So the evolution of the polyurathanes was to produce a superior product where the benefits to using that product could justify charging a little more money for the science and chemicals used to make it.

Sorry for the long explanation, but hopefully I have gotten the point across that polyurathane is just the natural evolution of paint and so you know that it has to have superior properties to the best of the enamels.

And naturally, the polyurathanes are not the be all and end all of the paint world... there are even more superior paints available out there that have been purposely designed to give even greater durability, color lock, temperature resistance, UV resistance etc. etc.

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