What kind of paint was being used on the c5 's from the factory? Looking for paint guru's to chime in here...anyone? Thanx in advance

 

I pass

 

Nearly all of the painting is done by robots, which are controlled by computers. This includes controlling how much paint is applied for how long, the direction of the spray gun, what gun paints what part computers even control opening and closing the doors to the paint booths.

The first step in the process is determining the number of cars to be painted. Paint department personnel puts the vehicles in batches of perhaps 10 cars according to color. Batching the same color cars together is best for the environment and it is obviously more economical to paint all cars of one color at the same time, or as many as possible. It is interesting to note that the body panels are charged electrically before they go into the paint booth. Therefore they attract the paint, which forces it to adhere to the panels more evenly and quicker and with less robotic motion and wasted paint.

Painting a complete Corvette body takes between six and seven hours. The panels arrive at the paint department with a grounding material already applied. (This material is also called a conductive primer.) The first coat applied in the paint booth is a dark grey or white primer. This primer is then baked for about 30 minutes at 265 degrees F. After this dries, any dust or dirt is sanded off. Next, one of eight water born base-coat colors are applied and allowed to dry. These paints are made by Du Pont and when applied, range from .07 mil to 1.2 mil in thickness. After the car panels are painted, they dry to around 80 degrees F, after which a clear coat is applied. Next, the completely painted and clear-coated body panels are sent to the oven where they are heated to about 250 degrees F for between 25 and 30 minutes.
Hope this gives you a good picture.
When repairing a C5, water born paint is not used at body shops because they do not have the extremely costly environmental restraints the factory has to control.
Bill

 

Thanks Bill - very good information.

 

Did not know our Vetts were painted with water based paint. When my wife had her Toyota painted last year after some yahoo decided to slam his truck into the driver side the dealership said they used water based paint. After talking to them they said all Southern California body shops are now legislated to use nothing but water based paints. He also mentioned that because of the process and the expensive equipment needed many shops are struggling with the technology and there are lots of sub standard work roiling out of them. His advice was to make sure if the shop is using this process and to check how long they have been doing it. You don't want your car to be their test rig. As it happens they converted to this process about seven years ago but according to him the first couple was a nightmare and they were repainting many cars before they got it down.

 

Thanks!

 

I used to work for DuPont Performance Coatings (now Axalta as DP sold the business)specifically on the Corvette account among others and Bill is spot on as far as the painting process.
As a newbie C5 owner (00 vert Navy Blue Met) I have a new appreciation for the quality of the paint finish and I thought I’d add a couple of tidbits.
The clearcoat used on the C5’s was a 2 component system that was mixed inline before application. This resulted in a harder finish than typical 1 component OEM clear systems. I’ve seen many people comment about the especially hard clearcoat when buffing. Also Millennium Yellow, Electron Blue, and Anniversary Red used tinted clearcoats to get a “deeper” color look. They would definitely “batch” these colors as you sure didn’t want Millennium Yellow clearcoat over an Electron Blue basecoat!
Unlike many other OEM painting processes, Bowling Green painted the facia’s (bumper covers, etc..) with the same OEM paint at the same time as the body. This helped provide a consistent color through the complete body. One quirk to this was that sometimes the color looked different between the body and facia even though they used the same paint and process. Pewter was especially difficult. The line between the rear quarters and bumper really showed the issue as they were flat surfaces next to each other.
Even during the C5 days nearly all OEM finishes were waterbased and many refinish shops are now switching to waterbased systems due to regulatory/environmental concerns.

 

Although I thought the changeover happened earlier than that: I had a variant of this conversation with the body shop that did one of my cars after an accident in early 2001.

 

nice information here.

I was just reading about a guy with color problems on a green car, and found they flush the lines between batches, but some paint residue remains in the line and shades some of the paint in the next batch. That is what he reported. He also said his paint supply store had four versions of his green paint, all slightly different shades, all using the same GM color code.

He had about 200 bucks in the almost right color paint. In researching the problem , one dealer told him the color was not GM and must be custom. No wonder GM thinned out the dealers, if this is one of the good ones they kept.

 

ET,Thanks for sharing
Fred

 

Thanks to all

 

Isn't it law these days to use water based paint?

 

Good info here

 

Depends on where you live: it's not a federal reg (yet).

 

wow lots of good info in this thread thanks Evil and jp6ivy for spreading some insight on how our vettes were painted , pretty impressive stuff I must say!