Red Paint Fades Quickly
 

Hello

I have a red 1986 560SL, which I can tell has been painted and not by the best of the painters. In any case I can bring the color out to a beautiful shine but I'm lucky if it last 2 months. I'm wondering if a inferior quality paint was used on this car and is there something I can do to help preserve the shine longer. Attached are pictures of the car as received well faded from the California sun and recently buffed and waxed. The Waxes Ive tried are McGuires Gold Class and NXT. I more recently tried another product, which I cant remember the name but it was in an orange bottle and it really made the car look good but would not last at all.

Was the passenger side front fender painted? In your first picture it appeared slightly different than the rest of the body. I know red and light blue both fade more quickly than other colors do from UV exposure. I never heard of a finish dulling more quickly because of the paint, though.

Red paint does does fade worse then other colors. The lighter the color the less susceptible to fade. I think MB still used single stage on base coats on in 1986. Try to apply a wax after polishing and wax regularly.

When it comes time to repaint, paint it with base coat / clear coat and you should not have that problem for many years.

Yes the right front fender is a shade darker. Like I said not painted by the best of show winners. The paint is defiantly single stage and will have to come off as soon as I can afford to.

Thanks for the replies

The further south you go, the worse this problem gets. Worse, it's almost impossible to match ANY paint, and red is among the most difficult. Just about any metallic is impossible due to the way that the flakes lay down when the paint is sprayed.

A lot of painters wouldn't even try to paint one body part at a time, they would paint to blend all sides your eye could see at one time adjacent to one another - so, for example, if you wanted to paint a fender, it would take the hood or a good part of it, the top of the other fender (maybe), and the side of the car with the replacement fender (at least up to a good part of the door). It's all done with "fooling the eye".

Finding a painter that can do justice to that car now that you've transplanted the V12 into it may not be easy.

I think that the OEM finish on that car was two stage. Red would have been the first color to be converted to base/clear. Base clear is much preferrable single stage, especially with red.

There are three reasons red fades fast. The organic pigments used in modern red finishes are more suseptable to UV degridation than other pigments. Red pigments do not hide well so there is a much higher percentage of pigment then with most other colors. The human eye can generally see red better than other colors, so small changes tend to be more noticable.

Red is also much harder to disperse. You have to use more "grind resin" per lb. of pigment. This tends to reduce durability from the resin side of the equation.

Bright yellow and purple pigments are also low hide, lower durability the blues and the greens.

Wax will not increase durability. It will only hide the inperfections. If you want a premium paint job on this car, you will need to paint it.

It will be repainted. I was planning on using Glasurit.

quick easy test to determine base/clear or single stage paint. Next time you polish or wax, look at your polish towel after a polish. If it is single stage your will be the color of the car. If it is clear coat your cloth will ony show whatever dirt you just polished off. hope this helps.

Yes, That's how I know its single stage.

If you are repainting the whole car. Use base/clear. It is significantly more durable, esp. with red.

Also if you are interested in quality, the level of the coating is more important than the manufacturer, at least with good manufacturers like BASF. All manufacturers have premium and value lines.

yeah, i noticed that, too. but it could just be the angle the pic was taken at. red is a very tricky color

Single stage will always lose gloss faster than base clear.

Now if you are talking about gloss loss between different quality levels of coatings; it can be quite dramatic.

Aliphatic Urethanes are always the most durable on cars. Alkyds are the least. Laqquers are in between.

Epoxies make great primers, terrible topcoats.

Urethanes are usually two component. The good ones are always two component in refinish products.

All other things being held equal, low VOC coatings will perform worse than high VOC coatings. One exception to this is when the coating is formulated with a "non-VOC" solvent such as OXO-100. These solvents are excluded from the VOC calculation.

This is overly simplified, but it is a good rule of thumb with regards to coatings durability on steel.