What is a factory finish?
Why does a car benefit from maintaining it’s factory finish?
Isn’t a quality body shop capable of delivering a car “like new” again?
If you are interested in any of these questions, please take the time to read this blog on factory finish:
When we talk about a factory finish, we are referring to the paint process applied in the automotive assembly line or factory. The automobile assembly line offers a step by step process to build a car in the most efficient and effective manner possible.
Once the body is assembled, it can be protected from corrosion with state of the art painting procedures. That process can be broken down into 5 steps.
- Phosphate Coat – necessary to protect the metal against corrosion and prepares the surface for the E-coat.
- E-Coat or Electro-Coat paint operation. The body is dipped in a bath in this process and voltage is applied. The body works as a cathode and the paint as an anode which greatly improves the protection against corrosion and the ability for the primer and paint to properly adhere to the car.
- Primer is applied and acts as a leveler, smoothing out the surface and serves as a protector. Primer will protect against corrosion, changes in temperature, stone chips, and UV light. Primer is applied at a temperature of 356* Fahrenheit.
- Basecoat is applied and refers to the color of the car – the paint. A car can be painted in solid paint, metallic paint, or pearlescent paint. Paint is applied at 284* Fahrenheit.
- Clearcoat is the final painting stage and is a clear protection over the paint and offers the glossy finish your car enjoys. Clearcoat is applied at 356* Fahrenheit.
This brief description of the factory finish process is designed to highlight the biggest differences between the original paint your car receives at the factory and a repaint process at a quality body shop.
The highlights are that the first two applications are not performed at a body shop and that the temperatures are not possible to recreate in the remaining painting procedures.
Another aspect to be aware of when comparing the two different processes is that most car base coat paints are metallic. Metallic paints are more dynamic and less stable in that there are many specs or flakes of multiple colors to create the overall look of the base color. For example, a car that appears a simple black actually has flecks of blue, red, green, etc…
Think about trying to recreate the color matching process with such a complex paint combination in the body shop environment.
As a result of the color matching difficulties, a body shop repaints are not localized to the part of the car that was damaged. To try to create the illusion that the paint color is a match, the body shop will blend the paint and clearcoat over and into neighboring panels. For example, if the fender was damaged and replaced, the shop would paint the fender and blend the color into the hood, bumper, and door. If they simply painted the fender, it would stick out like a sore thumb compared with the adjacent body panels.
In addition, the durability of the paint and clearcoat is considerably less when the extreme temperatures are not achieved as in the factory setting. In the body shop, there is no way to turn the heat up and paint at 284-356* as the rubber, glass, plastic, interior, etc… could not withstand that temperature.
Another benefit to using paintless dent repair is that your car will maintain it’s factory finish and it will maintain a clean CarFax report. Keeping your car original keeps your cars value. So keep your car just like it did when it left the factory.
This blog is designed to educate our customers or people interested in the subject to the differences between a factory paint job and a body shop repaint. It is not written with ill intent to the body shop industry as there are many quality shops who provide a great service when we have collision damage that is not repairable using the PDR method.
It is written to demonstrate how superior the factory finish paint job is to any other possible paint job and to illustrate the fact that you only get ONE factory paint job.
