Auto body repair & detailing: blending, color blender, acrylic enamel

Question
hey I'm a new painter and i don't know how to blend paint. at the shop we use rm paint line the old stuff not the water based. any tips will help alot. thanks for your time.

Answer
Hi Nate,

It depends more on the grade of paint than the brand. Is it base-coat/clear-coat or Acrylic Enamel? If it's base-coat/clear-coat it should be very easy to blend. In the PPG line we have a couple of products that help tremendously with blends. DX840 Blendease and DBC500 Color Blender. Either product you can mix with your left over base color and blend adjacent panels with.

Basically the blending technique is used to hide a color shift from fresh paint to existing paint left on the vehicle. For example, if I am painting the lower driver's door I would paint only where my repair was done and then I would mix the remaining part of my color with a blending clear making it transparent and spray around my prior coat of paint extending onto the old existing paint. Sometimes with metallic colors you will need to spray a coat of blending clear on the whole panel prior to painting. This will help you avoid a metallic "halo" ring when painting fresh paint onto old dry paint. The halo is caused by the metallics laying differently on the dried paint. When you spray a clear blender down first the metallics in the new paint all lay the same way thus avoiding the "halo" ring. Well I hope this helps you out and if you have any other questions please feel free to ask.

Gary