Who invented clear coat

Lifetime warranties are now commonplace, when before they were virtually non-existent. Advertisement But … the old lacquer and enamel finishes were a fantastic improvement over their brush-painted predecessors. Prior to , vehicles were painted using the same carriage-builder method used for decades. Not familiar with that method? Check out this explanation of the paint process from an early advertisement of the Studebaker Brothers Carriage Manufacturing Company in South Bend, Ind.

The most perfect, lasting surface of paint and varnish possible to put upon carriages. As the most vivid means of suggesting all the processes that culminate in a Studebaker finish, the accompanying panel was prepared. It illustrates the twenty-two successive stages of finish as they appear on every Studebaker carriage. But, there are other steps typical of Studebaker thoroughness that cannot be pictured: the chemists tests of oils and pigments; the careful preparation of the wood to take its finish properly; the repeated hand rubbing sanding and polishing to get smoothness; the perfect drying of the coats, an item that means fifty-two days of valuable time.

Can you imagine? Fifty-two days to paint a carriage! The drying times were extremely slow, and vast drying sheds of a very sanitary quality were employed to accomplish the task.

But durability was poor. The Japan varnish topcoats succumbed to ultraviolet rays in two to three years. Advertisement When the automobile came along, it was little more than a motorized carriage. But the use of more sheet metal required the use of corrosion-resistant primers, primer surfacers and new sealers —so these new products were added to the centuries-old system already in practice.

And this system was used to refinish the new and soon-to-be mass-produced automobile — a system that was woefully inadequate to the task at hand. Oh, Wow, Look What I Invented In the s, several paint manufacturers were involved in the development of nitrocellulose lacquers.

But one manufacturer in particular stands out. Have you ever heard someone say that many inventions come from mistakes? Advertisement In , DuPont was a leader in nitrate movie-film manufacturing. Little did the company know it was about to discover how to unlock the massive painting bottleneck auto manufacturers were suffering from.

It happened on a hot Friday afternoon in July , when a worker at the DuPont film plant left a drum of gun cotton cotton fibers treated with a nitrate solution out on a loading dock during the very warm weekend. Monday morning, concerned workers brought the drum inside and opened it up. This liquid became the foundation of nitrocellulose lacquer, which was the leading automotive finish for nearly 50 years.

Advertisement Two years later, in , the Oakland a precursor of the Pontiac was the first production automobile to be spray painted. Of course, many improvements had been made along the way in regard to force drying, application methods and product formula, but this initial discovery and subsequent use for spray painting unlocked the tremendous production improvement.

During the s, both nitrocellulose lacquer and alkyd enamel were used in automobile production. Many manufacturers also used combinations, offering black enameled fenders and a selection of colored lacquer bodies. What happened? Certainly our paint industry was no small player in research and development, and our automotive industry was a leader in production of mass-produced automobiles. This made many of the components for nitrocellulose lacquer off limits. So what did they do?

They focused on enamels. With their usual flair for quality and characteristic genius, they developed a fantastic high-solids acrylic urethane paint system for automobiles. This system was extremely durable in comparison to the air-dry systems of lacquer or synthetic enamel that were commonly used in the s — when the Europeans and their paint began a U. Advertisement Did the Europeans overwhelm the American competition immediately?

These European systems were just that, systems. By American standards, their systems were confusing. In terms of quality and durability, however, the Europeans were leading the pack.

This forced a lot of change upon American manufacturers. And American collision repairers. Advertisement I know. I Iived it. A paint jobber sent my wife and me to Europe, where he wined and dined us for a week — all expenses paid. Aside from evolving from natural products to synthetic ones, the method of applying car paint also evolved from hand painting to fully automated machines.

In the early 20 th century, automobiles were hand painted just like how horse-drawn carriages were painted. The paint used in those times were natural-based such as linseed oil and natural pigments. The painting process was tedious because brush application of multiple coats was required and painted cars took days to dry.

This process was a serious tailback in the automotive business. DuPont greatly improved the automotive paint system in when they developed nitrocellulose lacquer paints and primers to speed application and dry time to a week or less. Spray guns were used to apply this type of paint and it helped speed up vehicle assembly time. This helped cut down the time required to paint a car but it still required labor-intensive and time-consuming hand rubbing to make the paint finish shiny.

Also, lacquers have poor resistance to certain petroleum-based solvents. For example, repeated exposures to gasoline spills could damage lacquer finishes. Automobiles with gas filler spouts on their fenders had a problem with this type of paint. In the s, the alkyd enamel paints were introduced to the automobile paint technology. It turned out that thermoplastic acrylic resin technology dominated the automotive topcoat market in automotive coatings for about two decades, from the s through the s.

The reason for this was the excellent topcoat appearance that could be obtained with these finishes. In the automotive plant, this meant multiple coats of the topcoat were applied to reach the desired film build of about 2 mils.

Metallic effect pigments provide brilliant, shiny car colors that enhance the perception of curvature of the car body. These pigments took automotive color styling to a new level. However, to achieve the maximum visual effect of the flat, plate-like metallic pigments, the pigments must align parallel to the painted surface.

This coating technology had such an advantage for color styling that by the s General Motors painted virtually every car with acrylic lacquer topcoats.

Topcoat technology was steadily improving for automotive coatings systems, but cars still had a major issue—rusting of the automotive body. George Brewer at Ford around However, there were drawbacks in the technology and PPG Industries introduced the first cathodic e-coat system for automotive bodies in Because these coatings essentially stop the automotive body from rusting, this new primer technology one was of the biggest breakthroughs in automotive coatings technology.

Modern electrocoat automotive primers are applied by totally submerging the assembled car body in a large tank that contains the waterborne e-coat, and the coating is applied through cathodic eletrodeposition. The coating chemistry is waterborne enamel based on epoxy, an aminoalcohol adduct, and blocked isocyanate, which all crosslink on baking to form an epoxy-urethane resin system Figure 3.

This resin technology, combined with the excellent coverage provided by electrodeposition, delivers one of the most effective coatings for corrosion protection known. Virtually all cars use e-coat technology as the foundation of their coating system today. Although e-coat provides excellent corrosion protection, it does have two weaknesses for an automotive coating system: inadequate appearance and poor photostability. To remedy these issues, new enamel automotive primers were developed in the s.

These primer-surfacers were designed to be applied to the cured e-coat to give a smoother surface for improved topcoat appearance, while also providing opacity to protect e-coat primers from UV degradation. Primer-surfacers often provided improved impact resistance to reduce stone chipping of the coating as well. The combination of electrocoat plus primer-surfacer provided a total automotive primer system with excellent corrosion protection and an outstanding surface for topcoating.

As previously discussed, thermoplastic acrylic lacquer automotive coatings, given their excellent appearance, were the major automotive topcoat used in the s. However, these lacquer topcoats did have one significant drawback: they had weak exterior durability.

By the s, the automotive manufacturers were requesting better durability for automotive topcoats, as consumers were now expecting their cars to last at least five years, and they wanted the car to continue to look like it did when they first saw it in the showroom. At the same time, the Environmental Protection Agency began to promulgate new volatile organic compound VOC regulations that limited the amount of solvent that an automotive facility could emit into the atmosphere.

The high VOC content and weak durability of acrylic lacquer coatings were no longer acceptable in the automotive marketplace. So how did the automotive coatings formulators achieve higher solids, better durability, while even improving the appearance of the coating?

The answer is the next step change advance that occurred in automotive coatings: basecoat plus clearcoat enamel topcoat technology.