This text is an extract from the Poets and maintenance special AutoMotorKlassiek has issued. That edition is still limited available.
The paint, the coat of our classics
Car paints have been around as long as there are cars. Only the way they are made - and applied - has changed just as much over the years as the cars themselves. We look back on 120 years of car paint history and see what we can do with that now
The paint on cars has two reasons for being. It is extremely important for the appearance of the car and it must protect the parts of the car, especially the bodywork, from the elements. Lak must preserve a car, as good and bad as it goes. At the start of the car era, cars were exclusively for the happy few.
The production numbers were small and the manufacturers could take a lot of time to color their creations. The first cars were painted in the same way as coaches. The painters applied the paint with brushes in several layers. For that, the bodywork - the bodywork - had to be carefully put in the primer and varnished. In between, fillings and sandings were made time after time. Very long drying breaks were needed between these different actions. From the beginning to the gleaming end result, it could have been just eight weeks.
The lacquers were oil-based at the time. The top layer consisted of a binder, a mixture of natural resin and oil in which natural pigments such as carbon black provided the color. To keep the paint ready for use, solvents such as alcohol were added. This traditional approach did not fit in with the mass production that was starting. In Germany, the carved birthplace of the automobile, the car manufacturers made passenger cars in 1901 845. Nine years later there were 12.000.
The paint process must be able to keep up with that production. The oil-based lacquers were improved and the drying times were shortened by increasing the temperature. But in 1910, car paint was not dry until after three weeks. The end of vegetable oil-based paints came with the birth of Henry Ford's legendary Model T. Ford wanted to turn it into 1.000 every day. That was no problem thanks to the production line. But with an 20 day drying time of the paint types of the time, he would need a conveyor belt of 100 kilometers in length. The planned numbers could therefore not be realized with the available resources. Ford therefore sought an alternative that allowed a drying time of up to 50 hours. He arrived - back then - in Japan where shellac was used. That product was an extract that was mainly extracted from the secretion of aphids and thus the biological replacement of the vegetable oils and natural resins used until then.
The new paint was considerably thinner and could therefore be processed with the spray guns invented in 1910, Detroit. The biggest advantage: the thinner coatings dried faster. In the required quantities, this well-known product was only available in the color black, also as 'Japanese lacquer'. That is why the T Ford, as Henry Ford put it, was "available in all colors as long as it was black". The 'Tin Lizzies' were also delivered in other colors. Only that was at the expense of delivery times. After the first world war, technology went ahead with leaps and bounds. The arms industry had made huge quantities of nitro-cellulose powder worldwide. After the peace broke out, huge amounts of it were left.
The idea was to do something peaceful with it in one way or another. One of the results from that revenue-oriented thinking was the cellulose nitrate lacquer, better known as nitro lacquer or cellulose lacquer. That lacquer could only be applied with the syringe. There were few solids in the product and it had little gloss. That is why it had to be applied in several thin layers. Then it had to be polished - polished - to shine.
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[product id = ”163993 ″]
Tataaaa !!! The profession of car polisher was born!