Thread: Wrinkling Base coat

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dody,
It sounds like an old system coming back to life , and it isnt a good one .
A lacquer base under any type of urethane is a NON -repairable system. As lacquer is alot harsher and penetrates a urethane product , therefore lifting occurs.
Plus the Urethanes dont Bite real hard to a lacquer surface as it isnt formulated for it . ( I know all you old timers did it for years with no ill effects ).

Its why all the GM , Ford peelers , Chrysler 's of the 1990's , as they were trying to develop a fast BC/CC system and it was a lacquer type base , and it failed miserably !
Now its all compatible Acrylic Urethane systems .

I hated back in the day when a so called painter shot a complete with Lacquer , and then put Acrylic Enamel clear over the top , what a friggin' mess ! It looked good till the next painter had to spot repair it later due to a collision. It was due to a buddy doing a cheap complete job , then never took it back for the repairs , because insurance was paying the bill this time .

Remember lacquer does not like anything but itself .

SprayTech

SprayTech, The way we got the urethane to stick to lacquer was to use one, of two products, formulated to go on lacquer.

When they reformulated R-M's RV86 Clear, for VOCs, it would "blush" real easy, I had to redo an '81 Vette for this reason. (I've still got some if you want it) :-)~

After that I used Dupont 222S adhesion promotor. I forgot it once, and one of my Harley customers was at the car wash, and he had the entire sheet of clear come off of his hard bags in one piece!

I never had any reason to use a Urethane clear over a lacquer . and could never figure out why anyone else would either .
I learned to lay a beautiful enamel job , learned to float the resins to the top , made it look like it was clear coated .
Also hated the dead look of lacquers metallics .

The reason I used that combo was because when I started painting in '65 all of the custom colors were lacquer, and all production colors were available in lacquer. There was no hardener to add to enamels, so you could not put a show finish on them. Lacquer was really the only option for custom work.

After I moved to Arizona in '75, I started having trouble getting a lacquer top coat to live very long. I did mostly Corvettes at that time. The expansion rate is about like aluminum, and we have 40 degree temperature swings every day, so cracking was also a problem. For a while, in the late '80s, I added a small percentage of flex agent to lacquer. That worked pretty well.

By the time I switched to urethane as a topcoat, I kept a few thousand dollars in lacquer inventory. Remember I do custom work, and a typical job has 10-30 colors in it. Also I had learned to do a consistently reliable job, every time, so I did NOT want to start the learning curve over.

What made me switch was the rapidly disappearing choice of colors. There are a few things that urethane will not do, but I needed the options that laquer no longer offers.

BTW, This Spring I saw an '88 Corvette in a local show, that I did in lacquer when it was new. It still looked great, and trophied that day. :-)