It's still available from PPG, they're still making Duracryl. I know shipping the stuff is a problem, and its illegal in certain araeas. Not many jobbers are carrying it now. Not sure about Canada??
Hey, Thaz one good lookin' '57Bowtie! I bought a couple of cans of ol' #7 off the shelf of an independent auto parts store, here in town 5-6years ago. 'still in the old green metal cans! The last time I asked about "Liquid Ebony" at a paint counter, the kid behind the counter looked at me as if I'd jus' got off the Grayhound bus with a chicken under my arm! He musta thought I was talkin' about his girlfriend! He asked " what would ya wanna use something like that for, we got these "systems" now for polishing"! Yeah, systems, I walked out! S****ey Devils C.C. "There is no emoticon for what I'm feeling right now"
One of the best looking paint jobs I have seen was done just that way! The car was my pal's '40 Ford delux coupe. Looked like a black mirror.
Always sounded like too much work for me, and an old outa date way of doing things. BC/CC and be done w/it. I've done a lot of painting in my time, and you can get fantastic results by applying paint w/rocks...it just depends on how much time you want to spend on it. If you don't believe me look at all of the idiots w/a roller in their hand.....
Spoken like a true "youngster" of the internet generation. Nothing is worth the EFFORT of doing the best you can. I want my instant gratification right now I don't want to work for it. LOL The out of date way is worth the effort. Do one of them your new fashioned way then do an out of date hand rubbed black nitro lacquer job and park them next to each other. The results will show that all the effort is worth it and best of all no swirl marks to try and use magic to cover them up because there are none using the old fashioned way.
Corn starch is for removing swirl marks from the polisher. Hand rubbed lacquer is a term pulled over from fine furniture and oriental art. Even "back in the day" no self-respecting craftsman, OEM or independent, would waste the time required to do by hand what a machine polisher would do. There's hundreds of examples in photos from the 20s and 30s of cable driven buffers being used to level the surface. Sadly since the term was brought to the forefront of fine finishes, many have 'waxed on' thinking it was and is the only way. Well, sorry bout yer luck friends, it's wrong. To say that lacquer can't be done with a machine is false in so many ways. There's many who may never get 'in the zone' with a polisher and probably have no choice but to scrub away until it looks done, and I'd bet the 1st fender is always the best part of the car that seemingly got twice the size by the last fender. And yes, Liquid Ebony was a dream solution when 1st introduced. It took a while to get but once the wool pad was soaked with it the finish would come up like magic. And go ahead and call ******** on this one...I've polished lacquer with an air grinder fitted with a wool bonnet at speeds in excess of 10,000RPM. There's a few members here that have seen me do it. Hand rubbed? Not my finish...
Don't remember anyone in this thread saying "you CAN'T finish lacquer by machine". Just some of us want to do the best that can be done. Never saw a stick of furniture hand rubbed but have seen plenty of cars being done without any wood furniture around. Most of us self-respecting craftsmen, OEM or independent own buffers and use them on normal paint jobs but we CHOSE to rub by hand on certain jobs because of the superior results that can be obtained by hand for special jobs and when the customer wants to pay for the best. If you don't understand or never have seen the better results please feel free to use you machine. BTW you don't need corn starch or any other "magic formula" to remove the scratches or swirl marks from a hand rubbed paint job because there aren't any.
You are an idiot. My brother(RIP) hand rubbed his lacquer. "In the day" he worked in a body shop, had more "self-respect" in one finger than you have in your entire being, because he would never attack the self-respect of another person in such a rude manner as you have............................
LOL, way to lose your **** and sink to the bottom. I've talked to plenty of old body and paint guys. They all tell me if they had a buffer they used it. Except for on the very final polish, then they would hand rub it.
in 1970 i painted my `40 Ford sedan in lacquer and rubbed it all out by hand , i can't recall if i knew what a buffer was then... i think someone told me to do it that way anyway , it came out ok for a first try. sold the car in 1972 to a guy that still has it..the last time i saw the car maybe 10-15 years ago it still didn't look to bad
Especially with the development of finish preparation and application techniques, materials and tools over the centuries and decades, one can observe why fine craftsmanship and certain art forms are slowly disappearing as time moves on. Newer generations don't want to bother anymore with time-consuming, laborious craftsmanship, if 'similar' results can be obtained so much easier today than yesterday. If one has never even attempted to do something 'the hard way', how can somebody understand or see what the difference is? Wood for example is very unforgiving and if a craftsman can't properly sand (or better yet - shave) by hand, creating a surface that is truly ready for finishing, he should not instead use power tools or else he will most certainly mess up hours of work. That said, I don't have any problems with modern finishes and their application. It's all about what kind of end result you are after. I really like how easy I can finish all kinds of things today, that don't really need to have a fine finish.
Then we lacquered the whole damn thin, Platinum pearl, when pearl still came in a jar, and you s****ed it into your clear. Then I had to wet sand that sum***** with 600, the polish the whole damn thing with polishing compound -- BY HAND. Dad didn't own a buffer, 'cept for me. (pic is for reference to the acres of sheet metal)
Well if I was to do it in a rude way I might have approached it the way you just have. So to you I won't be as rude as you've been, Ill be more and say GO **** YOURSELF. It was in fact you who said "...leaves swirl marks..." regarding machine polishing as WRONG. So you know so much about me, tell me how many truely PERFECT finishes I've done in the past, and still continue to do. Which car will I finish next? I'll stand by MY research, that I chose to SHARE in the topic, since I have the reputation and historical do***entation to back it up. Did it ever occur to you that maybe I do more than just paint? I've seen responses in other posts by you that I too responded or started that I'd think you just might have a fractional idea of who you're speaking with. One thing is certain, I know now who you are and what your ideas and social graces are equal to. This pic is perfect for ya as well: If anyone would like to take the Pepsi challenge on 'hand' vs machine I'm in.
I kinda take offence to the "youngster" jab as I probly more old fashioned than most of the people on this board...someone told me something about ...."a compact disk" the other day and I dont know why people are so down on the floppy these days?.... Yep I'm a youngester 37 year old that has been around painting cars since about 4-5 years old. I use to watch my dad paint then I would unmask the cars till I got old enought to mask a car the right way somewere before I was 8. That means I have only been around painting for just over 30 years. You can do any paint job w/out swirmarks and it does not have to be Lac. You just have to know what you are doing. I have seen a few nice paint jobs in my time and very few of those were Lac. The main reason Lac. gets the credit for being "so " nice and deep is cause someone spent "so" much time on it. You just don't have to spend the time w/newer materiels. It's just a fact that was the only way of doing it back then. If I spent an ungodly anount of hours on a brushed on paint job in the end I bet you would say it looked good too...in case you haven't figured it out I think the guys w/rollers are idiots! By your way of thinking there is no better way than the old way so I guess we should throw away machinery and go back to building the way of the pyramids, brick by brick by hand???
So, if I used Lac on a turd, would it polish out better? Look what you guys made me do! A hand-rubbed turd!!!! Steven.
Hand Rubbed was always a sales/PR term for the painters I knew. They told the customers about the endless hours it took to hand sand a paint job, then how they "lovingly polished all surfaces by hand". Customers bought the story & paid the higher prices. Not one of them did it that way. They all seemed to wear out buffing machines & pads on a regular basis, because time is money even back then. Hey, BTW, you still can buy Turd Polish:
Oh boy, I get the feeling some of you guys have only ever polished "Bloated Buicks" and other "Shaved GMs " from the 40s & 50s! Try using a polisher on an alloy panel made from 1100 series aluminum, covered with swages, flutes and other Art Deco flourishes, or a bonnet panel held together with hundreds of rivets that's over five feet long! I'll be over here at the mixing bench, hoping we've still enough finish to blend in or reshoot that panel you jus' burned down to bare metal, when that rig gets pushed back into the paint dept. "Oh ye of little faith" ya say! Nope, I get paid whether I paint this panel once or several times! S****ey Devils C.C. "Hypocrisy is the Vaseline of Social ***********"
Guessing you didn't read the post???? "Most of us self-respecting craftsmen, OEM or independent own buffers and use them on normal paint jobs but we CHOSE to rub by hand on certain jobs because of the superior results that can be obtained by hand for special jobs and when the customer wants to pay for the best."
pimpin...you're right about that. Gettin around polished aluminum louvers on a Duesy hood, Riveted gas tank on a Rolls. Freshly woodgrained garnish moldings. All of em equal to pain in the hands and the occaisional busted knuckle. But to do a "bloated buick" entirely by hand? Well that's just silly. Lincoln, Packard, Cadillac, even the common man's Ford were all made shiney-pretty with machines. In ancient China and other oriental cultures the artisans would litterally HAND RUB the form of organic lacquer that they used. By that I mean the skin from their bare hand was used to rub the finish down to a gloss. They started with fine stones or powders but the last touch (no pun intended) was with a bare hand. In the early teens and perhaps into the early 20 by some, the automoive artisans at higher end OEMs would brush the lacquer on the surface in different directions then shove the coachwork (bodies) into a drying area for extended periods. Once dried they'd be blocked down with pumice stones and other forms of progessively smoother grits and finished with waxes from the time period. Was it wrong then? Nope, just all that they knew then. Lincolns were machine polished, cut and buffed, all of em, up until 70 or 71. GM went to a special heat reactive resin in their lacquers and the baking process produced the shine. There's more but I won't bore you all with the details. Easy enough to find, cept for 'nash maybe...
Hey, In 1982 I was working for a local shop that sold and serviced Lotus, Jaguar and the occasional Rolls. The shop owner was like something out of a ****ens novel, and I'm sure had the first buck he ever made, I'd no doubt he held paper with the devil on his own mother's soul! One day a Silver Wraith II came into the shop that had been taken in on trade, a three tone coloured beast with some serious paint problems. I'd suggested we reshoot the top third of the vehicle, as the last coat of lacquer, a champagne colour, was exhibiting the linear cracks that old lacquer gets. The owner didn't like my bid, and so I'd suggested I could possibly save the paint job, but no long term guarantee could be offered. The owner said he'd think it over and let me know. I went to lunch and upon my return found "The Village Idiot" a.k.a "The Idiot" , another employee of the shop, a self proclaimed expert on all things automotive paint related, hard at work on the Wraith. He had stated he had been painting "forever" and there was nothing anyone could show him! I used one of the few pieces of advice my old man had told me, that about not offering advice that wasn't asked for and kept my mouth shut. As I walked by, I'd noticed he'd grabbed a really dead, old cutting pad and some ''rough-cut'' compound and was burning the lacquer to death. " Ya gotta burnish these ol' lacquer jobs to get a good shine outa 'um!" he said. I shook my head and left for the day. The next day the job was parked in the booth and a note was taped to it from the owner. "Come see me NOW!'' the note read! I quickly looked over the hood and instead of a finely polished clear coated lacquer job, it looked like a ****in' giant pizza! Burned clear, burned colour, burned clear and colour. The owner came running into the shop, waving his hands in the air. "What happened!!?" he asked. "You hired a narcissistic ol' ****, and put a polisher in his hands, and you're askin' me what happened?" I said. I'd suggested before "The Idiot" butchered it, we wash the job with wax remover, bag the rest of the good finish with paper, piss coat the top clear/colour with retarder (Xylene), allow it to dry and lightly polish it, by hand with a very fine compound and wax. Now the only way out is to refinish it! I later repainted the top third of the vehicle. S****ey Devils C.C. "Nemo Me Impune Lacessit"
The Jalopy Journal
