How Clear Can Change Your Color

Spray Out Test

This is a brief demonstration to show the effects of building up clearcoat over and how it can affect your color match. Many OEM manufacturers recommend not bringing your first coat of clear to the edge because it can change the appearance of the color and how it is going to match up to your next panel. On some colors, it is minor while some more severe, two coats likely won\’t make a difference but this demonstration will show how the color can give off a different effect.

A member of this site (ryanbrown) gave the best analogy I’ve heard on the subject so I am going to borrow it for this purpose. Think of a swimming pool, looking in the shallow end you will observe that appears lighter than the deep end. It\’s the same liner, same lighting, so what is changing the look? The light has to travel further in the deep end and what your seeing is how long it takes for the light to reflect back at you. In the case of clear coat it\’s on a much smaller scale, so let’s see what the test reveals.

Here we have an assortment of sprayout cards created months ago (NH678M – Honda Silver , PP4 – Chrysler Jade Met.  & PB7 – Chrysler Patriot Blue.)

They have been scuffed quickly and taped off to apply more clear to half of each card.

After 4 coats of Glasurit 923-109 clearcoat they are unmasked and 1 more coat is applied to the entire card:

You can already see the slight difference in color, the bottom looks a little bit darker than the top. Depending on what kind of light you’re in the difference can look more or less drastic. Here is a shot of them outside:

You can see the tops of these cards, the Patriot blue looks a tad darker, the Jade looks a bit darker but the silver is relatively unchanged outside. For some reason, the silver has a much more drastic shift under the booth lights and not so much in the sun. The silver really reflects the blue mica when out in the sun and still has a bit of a change to it outside.