Hi all,

As I am sure you are aware, I had an unfortunate encounter with a deer a last week. The main damage was the bonnet and the headlights, these have now been replaced.

However, the paint was cracked and peeled on a section of the front bumper. Now, rather than sticking it in the sprayshop and pay c.£200-250 to get the bumper re-sprayed, I had a go at doing it myself. I have done this in the past (on other cars) with very good results (I consider myself a dab hand at this sort of thing)..... this time I have run into a little problem.

The section that I masked off and painted has come up looking a totally different colour to the rest of the bumper . I am not sure what went wrong, I had the paint supplied in an aerosol can from the local paint mixing type company, made to the paint code under the bonnet.

I have given it several coats of lacquer, this appears to be helping the situation a little. Tonight I will t-cut the area, hopefully this will flat down the paint and help the colour match.

Any ideas on what might have gone wrong?? I used grey primer, several coats, rubbing down in between, a coat of paint, rub down, several additional coats of paint, then several coats of lacquer, the finish is lovely, but the colour is off

Just to help, here is a pic with the area highlighted (a nice inconspicuous area!! )



Any thoughts?

Cheers

 

POC, the more primer and basecoat you put on, the worse it will get, because the basecoat is semi opaque and you are darkening what is underneath it. The whole bumper needs a uniform coat.

It is a nightmare to match small areas of metallics. The tints will never be the same to get an exact colour match, the original will have faded slightly, and the mica in the basecoat will lay in a different direction to the original thus reflecting the light in a different way. Also, the mica particles in an aerosol have to be much smaller to pass through an aerosol nozzle than they do to pass through a 1.8mm or whatever fluid tip on a robot sprayarm at the factory, and this reflects the light in a different way.

If you haven't gone right back to bare plastic, you may get away with rubbing off what you have applied so far entirely, t cut the surrounding area to clean/key it, and respray the area with basecoat then lacquer, with no primer.

Unfortunately, you will probably have to get the whole bumper sprayed if this doesn't work.

 

Thanks Dave, I will give that a go....

Looks like I will end up at the body shop

Paul