Paint question - single stage vs base clear

Just curious if anybody here uses single stage paint on their restorations vs base/clear that it seems like most have gone to.

Seems that the single stage would be closer in appearance to the original finish on their car if it was manufactured before the 1980s, and I'm guessing that it would also be cheaper and easier to work with?

Any other pros/cons to add to the conversation? What are your thoughts?

Single stage is more affordable, but if it has metallic in it and you end up having to wetsand it for excessive orange peel, dirt, etc. it can end up looking patchy. Adding some single stage clear to the color in the final top coat will make it more glossy if your after that look.

Base clear allows you to sand the clear flat and polish it. This method creates the closest thing to a perfect looking paint job, but won't look like an original oem enamel paint job at all. My car is base-clear sublime green and someone into original appearance restorations would not approve.

If the car were white, yellow, Vitamin C orange, black, or other colors without metallic then single stage is ok.

My dad has a car painted decades ago with white PPG acrylic enamel and it's still glossy like a new car. Just have to keep it clean and waxed.

Yeah there are guys who shoot single stage just so it looks original. Some of the really serious restoration shops do that and they try to duplicate some of the factory orange peel and they don't care too much if a run or two show up since the factory paint often had runs in it. My '65 Coronet is factory paint and if you look close you can find a few runs on the bottom of the trunk and places like that.

If you are doing it your self use base/clear. Any problem you have (except not hardening) can be resolved easily as you go.

What to use depends on what your goals are.

Personally, we use single stage in the engine bay simply because it is easier to touch up. But the rest of the car gets base/clear.

Base/clear does not look like the original paint, but neither will today's single stage unless you and your painter spend a lot of time matching and test spraying to mimic the old look.

Today's single stage is as different from the original paint as base/clear is. So, it takes a good amount of effort to duplicate the original finish. But single stage can be applied to look closer to the OE finish than base/clear can.

On a solid color you can make single stage look as good or better than base clear.

My experience is that base clear does not hold up like single stage. Usually the clear peels. My guess is that this is due to not having a bake booth to cure the paint and clear fast enough.

Catalysized enamel for me, sure it needs wet sand and buff but it lasts for decades.

There's a big difference in longevity between $150/gal Shopline clear and $400-up "name brand" clear. At least that's what all the painters I've ever talked to say...

As noted above the BC/CC (aka 2-stage) tends to look different than the factory single-stage. You can play with texture, but the clearcoat tends to increase the shine. That can be tweaked with a flattening agent in the clear. BC/CC will hold up better to sunlight, bird droppings, sap, etc than single-stage. A catalyzed single stage helps in that regard.
In 40 years of the collision repair & restoration business, I've probably inspected thousands of paint jobs: peeling clear has always been incompatible products, faulty application, surface contamination, or occasionally a faulty product (a PPG clear comes to mind, which was covered under their warranty). Paint is expensive, but generally speaking the least expensive product I've had good results with was Nason, if cost is a concern. Big fan of Standox. Both are currently owned by Axalta (formerly DuPont).

Thanks for all the replies! Good information there.

Let's look at another asppect - cost of materials and labor.

Say if you had an old 4-door with faded out paint that you wanted to look good but didn't want to spend a fortune on. In this case original appearance isn't as important as getting it done on a budget. Maybe you want to try to paint it yourself in your own shop or maybe you want to get the local paint shop to do it as reasonably as possible. What would be the best choice for each of these cases?

Another "rattle-can" option is Bill Hirsch Restoration Supplies. Excellent stuff.

- EM

http://www.hirschauto.com/

Acrylic enamel, like PPG Delstar, is a good choice.

Thanks, and I should have added this to my questions: What is the difference in cost of materials and labor (if I'm paying somebody else to do it) between the two?

Are both about the same from the viewpoint of health/safety considerations?

Appreciate all the info as I understand the paint situation has changed quite a bit since I last looked into it about 10 - 15 years ago. I'm trying to get a handle on the current situation.

I only do base clear on the exteriors. If I want something durable for trunk and engine bay etc. I use single stage urethane then mix with clear on the second coat. You can even mix base with the clear to make your own single stage.

I've sent a few 'driver' cars to Maaco after doing most of the prep myself. I've always been pleased with the results, but my goal was to have a presentable driver not a show car.

Thanks for the replies - really appreciate it.

I have applied both types. With a non-mettalic color, either acrylic enamel or base/clear can work fine.

Mettalic single stage is very hard to spray nicely. Not for me (an amateur) and also most body shop painters won't spray it. Its a lost art and/or formulations have changed. I do fine with mettalic in base/clear.

As far as cost goes, not sure... you would need to price it out with specific paints. I have used TCP Global/Autocolorlibrary.com house brand paints in both single stage and base/clear with good results. My Plum Crazy hotrod has PPG base clear... applied after an effort with single stage (mettalic) did not work out so well. Wish I had used base clear for this mettalic color from the start.

A driver type car with a solid color(non metallic) will be ok with single stage enamel or urethane paint.As stated metallic colors can be tough to spray and look right in a single stage,but can be done.Lighter metallic are harder to spray,like silver or light blue in single stage due to the high metallic concentration,mottling is a result.There are some decent base clear paints that are priced ok for a driver,ppg shopline for example vs their Delton line.If you have acess to Metalux paint it is good as well and priced very good,it is a polyester basecoat paint.
RT

Single stage metallic isn't that hard to spray if you know the right way to spray it. Problem is when it comes to wetsanding and buffing. That's the only reason I don't use it.

I hate hate hate base/clear. Every older vehicle I've worked with I have had to deal with peeling clear. Peeling clear is a pain to fix, it's a pain to feather the clear back into the base. I hate it. Once it starts peeling it doesn't stop. I'm an amateur but have found the same results with OEM base/clear as well as stuff redone at collision shops. The only time I begrudgingly use bc/cc is on metallic paints. Only because, like others have said, even the pros don't do metallics in a single stage. The internet is full of pics of how bad they can turn out. Because of that I try to choose solid colors whenever I can.



You can. The p sheets for the single stage urethane I most recently used even said how for a final coat you can mix the paint with their clear if more gloss is desired. I already find a nice single stage to be glossy enough for me. One thing I did note is my hack job back yard single stage paint jobs lay down smoother and flatter than OEM clear. I was somewhat unsure of my paint job until I took a close look at the clear on an 80k corvette sitting in the showroom of the chevy dealer last year. I would be embarrassed to lay down something so rough like chevy did on those corvettes. Yes I know if you want to spend a fortune on layering up clear and endless hours wet sanding you can get bc/cc laser smooth.



Single stage is cheaper. Materials cost half, sometimes less than half depending on how many layers of clear a guy intends on putting down when doing bc/cc. Of course that depends on the product line as prices vary wildly. I don't think your labor costs would be much different on a budget job. On a nice job the bc/cc will cost you more in labor because your guy will be putting on multiple layers of clear.

If you have something you want to get done dirt cheap, I have sprayed rustoleum. Buy a gallon of it, thin it out a bit to the thickness of milk. Do a couple thinner coats and lay down the final coat a little heavier to get it to lay down flatter. Don't even think about wet sanding it until you've let it harden in the sun for a couple months because with it not being catalyzed it will never be as hard a legit paint but it can do the job on a budget. Even when wet sanding that stuff you have to be very careful because it wants to gob up on your sand paper. I would generally caution against this however because to do a nice job, you will want to have spent some money on good filler (not cheapo bondo) and several coats of a high build filler primer, hours of sanding and resanding that in most cases it doesn't make sense to cheap out that hard on the final coat.

I was finally able to post a picture of my 71 RR, go back to my earlier post and check out a single stage pain job.

Thanks again for all the info.

My situation is this: I sold my last old mopar some years ago (time flies) and I'm considering getting back into the old car hobby by getting a '60s or '70s car that is solid but cheap, which will probably end up being a an unpopular 4-door (but still something that I like). I occasionally kick myself for passing on a '69 Satellite sedan a few years ago that was low-mileage and solid but ratty paint - it ended up getting parted by some dude who had a rotten Charger.

I have recently been looking at a couple cars that have flat, faded metallic paint, so of course I'm considering what would be the cheapest way (without overly sacrificing quality of materials) to spray myself but not have it look too terrible. Perfect is not required, but I'm not into the rat rod look.

I've only sprayed single-stage with a gun once before (metallic green) and it didn't come out too bad, but I'm thinking if I totally suck at it now then I would have to look at getting it done by somebody.

That's the basis of my questions. I haven't bought a car yet and am not sure if I'm going to consider the ones I've looked at or hold off. So, it's a good opportunity to consider how to handle the paint situation.

Plus, I've heard horror stories on the cost of nice paint jobs being like triple of what I would consider paying for the car in the first place. Hence, being concerned about cost.

At the moment I'm leaning towards single stage because I wouldn't want to deal with the clearcoat peeling issue. I figure that a decent single stage job wouldn't look much worse than what they applied back in the day, as long as the metallic didn't end up all splotchy, as you all have been describing.

So, thanks for all the input. Any other comments/advice would be muchly appreciated.

First off, most of the costs come into play with the pre-paint prep. The actual painting is not that much of the budget. Painting an entire car and then cutting and buffing should be able to be accomplished in a few days. But the prep can often stretch to weeks.

And contrary to a previous posters experience, base/clear does not have a problem with peeling.

Virtually every new vehicle built the last 35+ years has been base/clear. Notice many peelers? And only a couple of the responses here has noted a problem with it.

Like many others here, I have sprayed both. I am not a professional painter by any means, but I have never had clear peel on one of my jobs. Never. But I have seen it happen. And the problem always comes down to mis-matched products or poor prep. Base/clear is no more prone to problems than single stage.

Spray what you want, just don't let an isolated negative experience or two sway you the wrong way.

Back when I worked at the Chevy dealership they had a recall on S-10 pickups with bad clearcoat - ones with white paint specifically. They gave us a list of vin #'s and we rounded them up and put them in a row so the body shop guys could pull them apart and strip + repaint the window jambs. We were told the factory told the dealerships that the clearcoat on that batch of trucks could lift causing the glue-in glass to come out with it.

They did not repaint the whole truck. just the window jambs. I guess a complete repaint wasn't covered, and they would play the waiting game and fix the whole paint job later if the paint on those particular started to let go prematurely?

i agree 100%

i am a PPG certified painter. been certified since they started the certification in the late 80's. i currently spray water basecoat clearcoat. i started painting PPG basecoat clearcoat since DBU was first introduced in the early to mid 80's.
i have never had a clear coat peel problem in over 30 years.

if you have a peeling problem you did something wrong.
5 biggest errors.
most common mistake is lack of film build on the clearcoat.
second one is spraying the last coat of basecoat on to dry.
trapped solvents.
then contamination of film build.
mixing manufacturers products.

Why are all of the 90's cars bare metal now?

do you mean why did the paint fall off cars in the 90's?

the biggest reason is because the manufacturers didn't put enough paint on the cars.

with not enough paint on the car allowed the ultraviolet light to penetrate the chemical bond between the sealer and the color coat. causing the color to de-laminate between the 2 coats.

i have painted thousands of cars with that problem.
at a high volume dealer body shop i probably painted at least 10 completes a week for 5 years.

Umm, yeah. Periodically I'll buy one for cheap, clean it up, repaint it and make a couple bucks of side cash for my troubles. I have a toyota in my garage right now, peeled everywhere, doing a single stage job on it because it was just a solid color car.

Thanks again for all the replies!

I was thinking of going single stage red urethane and then water sanding and then clear coating.

My brother has been spraying cars for years. He can spray single or base coat but me personally I'm a big PPG fan. Here's my car in Deltron FF4. Sprayed the complete car with it, trunk, jambs and engine compartment. Can't wait to get it out in the sun.

you can do that no problem. you will have less texture and the gloss retention will be better. the problem is it will look just like a BC CC paint job. when you clear solid single stage paint you are just replacing the BC with single stage color. i would recommend tinting the CC with 30% of the color. you will be spraying a really translucent color over your blocked out color. you won't need coverage because the solid color you blocked out does that. painting this way will give you really good depth when you look at it. it will have much better gloss than just a solid color. when you mix paint this way, mix it with whichever ratio uses the most catalyst. with PPG i know the solid color mix ratio is different than the CC ratio.


when i spray DCC single stage solid color i paint 2 coats of mixed solid color. i then put 4 coats of solid color mixed 30% color 70% dcu2021 clear. i them block out and buff. the clear added to the color makes it much easier to buff. it will have really good depth also.
when i paint it's in a down draft baking booth so there isn't much difference in bake times. when spraying this way air dry add about 20% more dry time before cutting and buffing due to more film build.