So I always hear people talk about had rubbed laquer, what the hell does that mean, what is it rubbed with, does that mean it is buffed by hand? Or what? Can some one explain this for me please? I have seen adds claiming to have 30 coats of hand rubbed laquer paint! Whats teh deal?? Jim
I googled this; Apply a light coat of lacquer. Let the first coat of lacquer dry completely before adding a second coat. Typically the new coat will dissolve a bit of the previous coat, allowing the two coats to mix and even out any over-spray areas. After the lacquer dries, should you find any spots that have excessive lacquer (drips, runs, orange-peel, etc.), you can lightly spot-sand with 400-grit sandpaper followed by tack cloth. Add several more thin coats of lacquer. Always remember that with lacquer, less is more (so to speak). Avoid the temptation to over-apply the lacquer, as more problems are created by too much than not enough lacquer. After you have applied as many coats as you feel necessary, allow the final coat to dry for at least 24 hours. Then, lightly wet the surface and sand the entire finish with 400-grit sandpaper. This step will dull the finish, but it is a necessary step. Follow this dulling step by buffing the surface with 0000-steel wool (which will dull the surface even more). Next, lightly wet the surface with some soapy water, then sprinkle on some pumice powder and, with some cloth (such as an old T-shirt) wrapped around a sanding block, rub the finish thoroughly. Use a clean, damp cloth to wipe down a section after rubbing with the pumice mixture to check your progress. After properly rubbing with pumice, you should have the equivalent of a semi-gloss finish. For an even glossier final look after completing the pumice step, rub down the project using some rottenstone with a little bit of butcher block oil for a lubricant. The rottenstone is a much finer abrasive than the pumice, and is a perfect compliment to the pumice finish (be sure not to skip the pumice step, as rottenstone won't give the same results alone). As a final step, apply a thin coat of paste wax. Buff the wax to a mirror-shine.
When I started painting cars in the '60s my dad wouldn't let me use his buffer. His reason was I'd burn the paint, so hours of block sanding, rubbing compound and polishing compound. Topped off with liquid polish and finally wax. But to properly do the job weeks were devoted to sanding then allowing the evaporation of the thinner (solvent) and finally the finishing process. I still spray acrylic lacquer but the catalized paints now available make the job less labor intensive. My arms used to feel like they were falling off from sanding and rubbing. I now use a variable speed buffer on lacquer and with the current products for polishing work better than the old methods. The FOGGER
I think it's mostly people bragging to justify how much they spent on a paint job. In " the old days " many people didn't use fancy paint booths, so they got more dust and bugs in the paint and had to sand between coats. It took a lot of work to get that deep, glossy, perfect paint job. With a clean booth and modern paints that kind of work isn't as necessary. Lacquer takes a higher gloss than enamel or urethane, but isn't as durable. Also lacquer has to go on thinner with multiple coats, as each new layer softens the previous paint. Too wet and the layers will sag, so lacquer takes more time and labor to paint.
Just a note for the non-painters; My definition of a "one coat"; A cross-coat tack coat, followed by a wet coat. Lacquer cures by evaporation of the solvents, therefore a second coat cannot be applied immediately, must wait a little while until the solvent all flashes off. In the '50s, (my brother worked in a body shop), there wasn't much to work with as far as fillers go, hadn't been developed. There was lead and body files, so at a certain point they started spraying on coats of lacquer to fill the divots. Some took a lot of coats just to fill the low spots. Block sand the high spots, fill the lows, repeat, repeat. The number of coats for lacquer is by the nature of the process going to be more than enamel, but just like people that take 3 or 4 coats of enamel to get it right, so it goes with multiple coats of lacquer. I've seen beautiful jobs, my brother's, the last one he did was '95 on our grandpa's '29 Ford, where he put on about 5 coats and hand rubbed it. No you shouldn't buff it with a rotary, it'll leave circular swirls like all getout. Yes you can still get lacquer. http://www.hirschauto.com/prodinfo.asp?number=NITL-GAL
30 coats. As if. So 50 coats would be better. How about 100? I love hearing the brags about the million-coat paint (I don't mean you, cf, I mean, you know, in general). This is how you can tell when someone does not understand paint at all. Does anyone really think that if I show up with 500 coats of paint on my car it would look better than with 4 coats properly applied? You need enough paint on the car to be sanded and polished dead flat, no more. Jeez.
Rubbing finishes is pretty common in fine woodworking still today. But was common practice with all types of finishes in the days before fine sanding materials and spray equipment become widely available, if the appearance of the surface was supposed to be really smooth and even. Finishes were applied with special (or not) brushes or rags folded in a certain way, sometimes containing other absorbent materials. I prefer hand-applied oil, shellac or nitro cellulose finishes on my stringed instruments and cabinets when it's time to do the finish. One technique from the old days is french-polishing shellac where you use a lubricant like walnut or olive oil and you literally rub on multiple layers over several days. I have done this on an archtop guitar once and ended up with about 36 coats, to get the finish appearance and sound that I wanted. The final look is unlike anything you can achieve by any other means and you take into account how the finish will keep curing and aging over the decades to come, thinning and stretching out to a very fine skin that is hardly noticeably above the wood pores. Sounds indescribable after about 10 years of controlled drying. Some believe the finish is what gives a stringed instrument its sound and makers centuries ago kept materials and techniques a family secret. I only mention this, because finishing, at least used to be, and still is sometimes considered a separate art form. Early car makers never went that far, but I wouldn't be surprised if hand-applied finishes are used today on certain high-dollar cars. If done right, using the right materials, technique and endless patience, you certainly would be able to get results that are noticeable to some who care about such things and can pay for it.
I've done it on 2 of my cars. Hella lot of work but it sure looked great. Lacquer gets thinned down a lot so it takes many coats to build film thickness. It's also somewhat translucent so it take many coats to get uniform color but that's also what gives it it's depth. Not as wet looking as today's clear coats. It also dries so fast that you can spray it in some dirty locations. Also easy to touch up. Kind of miss it.
basically its one of those miss-used terms , like "balanced and blue printed" by the guy sellin ya an engine he just sprayed the valve covers on, lol since ive been paintin, going on 40 years, lacquer paint jobs were rubbed out, using your hands, firmly gripped on the buffer. the term hand rubbed, and rubbed between coats are rarley used by guys in the paint business these days i remember reading that many years ago they used to rub the brush painted varnish jobs between coats with a pumice block. i dont know of any one doing that today skull
I've painted lots with lacquer over the years. Totally miss it, if I could get some more Tuxedo 99A Black lacquer I'd spray my next car with it. The magic number for me was 22 - 26 coats. We would put 4 - 6 coats on then wet sand it by hand in 1000grit, then we'd spray another 4 - 6 coat on and repeat. Then the last few coats we'd put it on a lil heavy, then we'd hand wet sand it again and then Br***o it. Would look like gl***. Those were the days! -Shiny
Hey, Prior to the advent of automotive finishes that contained catalysis, either enamel or urethane, two types of finish were in popular use: Enamel was used because it dried to a gloss finish and required no polishing. Enamel, unlike lacquer, dries from the surface inward. Lacquer, as an automotive finish was also used, but unlike enamel it dries from the inside out, from the evaporation of solvent, in and between coats of finish. Lacquer is usually thinned to 150-175%, enamel usually 25-50% solvent. If there ever was a secret to a lacquer paint job that lasted longer than a few seasons it was multi layers of very thin coats of finish. This is where the 25, 27, 30-whatever comes into usage. Anyone who thinks he's gonna pile 3-4 coats of lacquer on a job and get a long service life from it is fooling himself! I learned to coloursand and polish lacquer, both nitrocellous and acrylic, with cheesecloth, ground pumice and rottenstone. The final polish was done with cornstarch and kerosene. This was always followed up with a paste wax job, usually straight carnuba wax, and usually several coats of that. Today Urethane finishes are used by all but a few of us, and some claim they look better than lacquer, thet do hold up well, but I've never seen a urethane job that looked like anything but a "urethane job", i.e. "street rod paint" ,plastic and phoney! S****ey Devils C.C. '' I Liked The Old Millehnium Better!"
Pimpin- I heard of a restorer's trick to get more of a lacquer look with urethanes. Concept uses the same catalyst for the single stage as the clears. The trick is to use 30% clear in the last color coat. Ever heard of that?
Best thing about a hand rubbed lacquer paint job is NO SWIRL MARKS. Even a black car nice and clean in the bright sun or inside under florescent lights and you can look all you want and no buffer swirls anywhere. BUT it comes at the cost of REAL TIRED arms. If it's your car it's worth it but for a customers car it would be a lot more expensive because of all the hours involved to make one shine like gl***. We didn't have any special tricks or ingredients just lots of hours spent using plain old rubbing compound, a dry cloth (maybe a little damp for the last few strokes), and lots of rubbing. There is no painted surface that looks better than a car painted with old time black nitrocellulose lacquer and finished by hand rubbing. If you haven't felt "The heat" from rubbing compound across paint long enough and hard enough to generate heat you can feel through whatever cloth you are using you aint' an "old timer" like some of us.
Yeah, I used that trick alot in the days of acrylic enamel, the jobs held up better because you wern't jus' loading on clear. Straight clear, even with the UV screeners in them were always trouble, long term. I've tried that with HOK and it does look good, but it still looks like a urethane, which is o.k. if that's what your customer wants. S****ey Devils c.c.
I believe, once upon a time, it referred to color sanding between coats of lacquer, which would be followed on the last coat by color sanding and buffing to a hard shine, by hand (or arm). That's what it used to mean. Now a days, at least around here, "Rubbing One Out" has become a euphemism for ************ (As in, "He's in the head, rubbing one out, so his chub wouldn't freak out his date." ). Not sure why or when it made the transition, but it's commonly used that way around here by just about everyone under about 45 yrs old.
You can really see the guys here that haven't been around long enough to know anything about lacquer. Yeah, there might be all kinds of complicated, old fashioned, or home grown methods of buffing out lacquer, but all this term means, is sanding and buffing, just like you do today. lacquer is just much easier to do. And yes, is CAN be done by hand, and not even remotely as difficult as today's urethanes. And, yeah, 30 coats of lacquer is NOT uncommon, for a nice paint job. Because of the solvent ratio, and the absorbtion of solvents into the substrates (primer, and putty) lacquer paint jobs had a LOT of shrinkage, and dieback of the shine. So you would combat this, and avoid solvent trapping, by putting on 5-7 coats of lacquer, wait a few days, sand it, and do it again, multiple times. AGAIN, it is NOT like uro, it is easy to sand! so this isn't as hard as you think! Lacquer goes on very tin, and more than half of it evaporates, so 10-15 coats is about the same as 2-3 of enamel. So many myths, and misconceptions! There's no mystery about it, it was a simple system, once you understood it.
here 99a was duponts centari acrylic enamel, and 99L was the lacquer, iirc. i think in some markets its still available, i know the centari is skull
thats true......i recall a ford p/u we painted in nitro black, the reflection was so good if you stared at it for a few minutes you didnt iknow if you were looking at the reflection, or the actual object being reflected. i also recall the nitro lacquers rubbed easier than the acrylic ones. skull
The only problem with nitro black is if you don't keep after it it will start to turn chalky white. Just like you see old garage finds that have a chalky whitish film on them. But the good news is a bit more compound and it's gone.
Hey, One of the best tips on usin' lacquer an old boy gave me was NEVER shoot lacquer over anything but lacquer, and always the top coat over a sealer! We didn't have all the ''fancy-dan" primers and surfacers we have to pick from today, ya had lacquer-surfacer, an alkyd primers. The alkyds would build up well, but only a fool would try and use them under a sealer and lacquer. The lacquer primers and surfacers dried fast, and would alloy you to build up repair areas, usually in one day with heat lamps, but shrank badly, usually as the top coat of lacquer started to flash and contract. These lacquer undercoats were like a sponge and would hold thinner, sometimes for weeks if not allowed to flash or not sanded between several coats.If you piled several thick, wet coats of lacquer over semi-cured primer you could pretty much count on heavy sandscratch swelling, swelling that couldn't be coloursanded out, and requiring you to completely remove the top coat, resand and reprime and resand prior to top coating again. Lacquer, as a finish is deseptively simple to shoot, but if try and get cute and ''cheat the hangman" you can count on getting your *** handed to you on a plate! Alkyd, acrylic, epoxy & urethane all had/have their uses, and rules, what you can and can't get away with, but only a lacquer job, properly "rubbed out" looks like a lacquer job! S****ey Devils C.C " I Liked The Old Millennium Better"
Here's some pics of the 57 I'm just finishing up in Black Lacquer. I shot 6 or 7 coats, left it sit overnite, sanded with 600 and then shot another 7 coats on. I left that sit for a couple days and started sanding with 800 grit, 1200, 2000 and finally 3000 trizact pad. I used all 3m compounds just as I do with my BC/CC. This car is a dust magnet. In my opinion it is very difficult to get all of the micro scratches and swirls out of black lacquer, or maybe they just show up much better in the black. It's almost as if you can put little scratches in it by wiping it with a micro fiber cloth. Lots of rubbing. I remember using the old Dupont No. 7 and the Liquid Ebony on black cars, years ago. Do they still have those??
bn not sure it they still have # 7 for sale or not. i got a 2 litre bottle that is like 20 years old. as you say it was the **** for black, used to use #5 to fill swirls, then #7 to bring out the shine. also used to use blue magic metal polish and water, you could really bring up a shine with that stuff. true black is a dust magnet in any system, and polishing without getting the fine scratches is an art form in itself. skull
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