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Warning: A painter in Dayton talked me into skipping sealer on a respray, and the solvent pop showed up 3 weeks later
I have been spraying for 16 years and I still kick myself over this one. Back in April a painter named Dale, who I have known since my days at a shop off Third Street in Dayton, watched me prep a rear quarter on a silver Accord and told me to skip the sealer and just lay the base right over the 600 grit. He said modern base coats bite fine and sealer is a waste of material and an extra hour on the clock. I trusted him because he has been doing this longer than me, so I did it his way. Three weeks later the customer came back and the panel had solvent pop all over it, tiny pinholes you could feel with a fingernail. I had to strip it back to bare metal, reseal, and reshoot the whole thing on my own dime, which ate about $180 in materials plus a full day I could have spent on paying work. So here is my question for the group: how do you handle it when a veteran in the trade gives you advice that goes against what you were taught, and do you test it on a small panel first or just take their word?
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nina_jenkins22d ago
That pit in my stomach reading about the silver Accord is real, because $180 and a lost day stings worse when it came from trusting a guy you've known since the Third Street days. Dale has probably laid base over 600 grit a hundred times and gotten away with it, but solvent pop doesn't care about anybody's years in the trade, it just shows up when the prep and the product don't match. My rule now is simple, if the advice goes against my gun maker or my tech sheet, I shoot a test panel first before it ever touches a customer's car.
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