[ProdigyCustoms]

I am old enough and have painting long enough to have gone through many paint systems and ideas.

When I started in the late 70s lacquer was it. Lacquer is a evaporation dry system. 40 coats of hand rubbed lacquer was the snaz! Looked fantastic, held up not so good. But that was OK because you could always blend repair it when it had a issue because it never really dried!

Then came Imron and Acrylic Enamels with hardeners in the early 80s. The hardener made the system a cross linking chemical dry. It was pretty cool to be able to cover a car in 3 coats. Pretty hard to sand and buff though, and if you cleared a metallic the mils got stupid thick with 3 coats of color and 3 coats of clear. If you kept the mills down with these materials they were maintenance free and held up OK

Then came Urethane clears to use over lacquer bases in the mid 80s. This was the paint companies first solution to repairing the first factory base clears. Talk about a explosion waiting for a place to happen. Put a cross link curing clear over a never drying lacquer that fumes come out of for ever, and the lacquers fumes continue to pull through the urethane reaching for the sky until they lifted the cross linked urethane clear off the car. Remember all those cars with the clear peeling? NOT a bright idea!

Then came the first base clears with basemakers. Basemaker base coats were thinner then acrylic enamel base colors and dried with a combination of evaporation and cross linking and were designed to be cleared. Lots of workability issues with those first base coats. Also lots of adhesion problems even for the factories, just find a 1986 Oldsmobile 98 that the paint did not come off in sheets! i was repairing late models then and was fixing peeling paint on one year old cars. And using stuff that would peel to repair it!

Through the 90s and into the new millennium the paint companies perfected the urethane base clears. It was early in the 90s I got a hold of the first product I really thought did not suck. And now they are pretty much perfect.

So what do they do..........take it all away and push everyone into latex! The paint company wants to GIVE me waterbase paint for my cars if I will become a "spokes shop" for their waterborne ****!

I have seen some gorgeous jobs done with it. Scott's Hot Rods has won the Grand National Roadster Show a couple years in a row with it. It sprays out and looks nice. Call me jaded, but my experience tells me just like you don't want the first year of any Corvette model change, you do not want to use new paint products until they have been around and have a track record.

No one can really say how these waterbourne materials will hold up 10 years from now, they have not been in the field long enough. And answer me this...........I am in Florida in 80% humidity. How does it ever dry 100% if the air is wet!

The tree huggers will take away our oil base materials sooner or later, and when I have to start using it we will change. But I will let the other test dummies use it for now and report back with durability reports.