AERO Paint Technology - Have we talked about this one?

[sand_man]

So I was re-watching the 2015 Tudor 12-Hours of Sebring and the talking heads mentioned that many of the cars were no longer using wraps for their livery; that they had in fact returned to a paint technology. Apologies if I've been hiding under a rock and this is old news, but seems like pretty cool stuff.

AERO | Advanced Paint Technology

[stomachmonkey]

How scratch resistant is it?

On a race car I don't think you care.

If it's a one coat process and as they say uses less product to cover is it too thin for a DD long term?

[911SauCy]

Thin wins

I heard some crazy numbers once about the Castrol John Force funny car camp. Despite being mechanically identical, the black livery car was some 49lbs heavier than the white ones.

Nuts

[GH85Carrera]

That is a worthless web site. It looks like some of the political BS email I get with GIANT fonts. No information about how it is done or how it works. Just a big fluff ad. Puppies and rainbows and unicorns are pretty.

How is it applied and how much does it cost?

[jorian]

Originally Posted by stomachmonkey

How scratch resistant is it?

On a race car I don't think you care.

If it's a one coat process and as they say uses less product to cover is it too thin for a DD long term?

In their marketing they claim that one coat of the paint can withstand a 10 minute sandblast from 16" away at 100 PSI with 80 grit material. Sounds pretty good to me. No word on the cost though.

[kach22i]

That test was from 1.25 feet, right?

Impressive, also said no primer required.

They apply it to bare metal, filler and fiberglass then?

[sand_man]

I have many of the same questions!!!! And I agree, that website is a lot of "fluff"

[sand_man]

Looks like it might also be used in the aviation industry.

[sand_man]

So is it applied film based "paint"?:

[kach22i]

So weird, if it's a film, then why do they call it a paint?

Marketing?

If it resists sand blasting so well, how the heck do you ever remove it when you want to change colors?

[Captain Ahab Jr]

I've been involved in a few lightweight paint and vinyl film experiments and track tests on race cars.

Once worked on a 12 lap qualifying only F1 car where we only wiped the bodywork with a light stopper and then put the colour straight on. Holding the panel up you could see pin pricks of light through the panel. The bodywork construction was 0.09mm carbon skin either side of a 4mm thick paper honeycomb core but the weight of the paint was still about 25% of the total weight.

Vinyl film can be lighter weight than road car paint but compared to a well painted race car it will be heavier

Vinyl film should be used nowhere near aero surfaces as any areas where the self adhesive bond fails will cause surface imperfections that can cause an aero performance loss.

As for paints metallic paints are around 15% heavier than the same colour non-metallic paint.

Different colours have different weights for the same thicknesses, the difference is from the materials used for each pigment colour

There is only one way to save paint on a race car and that is to paint less of it and leave more exposed carbon. You just have to look at the last few Ferrari's to see what I mean.

[jyl]

Can the carbon resin be tinted, to get a base color w/o paint? Then you could just use paint of film for the sponsor logos.

[Captain Ahab Jr]

Good question, tinted black yes, but you would still get the carbon grey/black effect depending on the light source direction when veiwing it

I've used black tinted resin on the McLaren F1 supercar but this was to disguise any resin rich areas as some of the car was not painted and the standard amber coloured resin would really highlight poorly laminated corners

I think you can buy brightly tinted resin but I have never seen it used with carbon for structural panels, only decorative fibreglass parts.

With the F1 road car and GTR Le Mans GT1 race cars, the cars painted by a road car paint shop were around a lot of kgs heavier than the cars painted by a paint shop that had plenty of experience painting the Brabham F1 race cars.

I keep meaning to talk to some paint shops that paint F1 cars so I can try and rank the different colours according to weight as I'm building a lightweight 964 C2 and am exploring every way I can think of to reduce weight.

From memory of conversations long past past British Racing Green is a heavy colour, white isn't that lightweight due to the titanium dioxide they used for the pigment but not as heavy as black.

[Porsche-O-Phile]

Paint weight adds up. In the earliest days of the shuttle program as some of you may remember, the ET (external fuel tank, which supported the orbiter and sat between the two solid boosters) was painted white to enhance the look of the assembly. The paint weight alone was 600 pounds - pretty significant when you're schlumping something uphill to orbital altitude / velocity. Later the "orange" tanks appeared for the remainder of the program - the untreated insulation color.

It does add up...

[herr_oberst]

It was McLaren, back in the Marlboro liveried days of Senna and Prost, who began stripping all paint off bodywork between races. Ron Dennis would never present anything but an impeccable race car to the grid, and the paint was never more than one coat thick...
Then, the story the Capt. Ahab tells about the ultrathin panels! So typical of F1 where everything is taken to absolute extremes!!!

[sand_man]

I guess the reason I started this thread was over the notion that wraps were being replaced by a new paint system in the racing world. However, after a slightly deeper dive it appears that this AERO product is also a wrap, albeit a thinner/lighter film.

[Won]

Originally Posted by Captain Ahab Jr

There is only one way to save paint on a race car and that is to paint less of it and leave more exposed carbon. You just have to look at the last few Ferrari's to see what I mean.

Last summer, we did a re-fit of a new monocoque for a now defunct F1 team, after they smashed up the car at the last race before the summer shutdown. It was absolutely shocking how much body filler was in the old one, let alone the amount of paint. Worse yet, every void on any bonded component was full of adhesives. I know some smart engineers who worked there, and wonder how they felt about the shop guys undoing hours of hard work and grams saved in CAD

So that's what the other end of the grid is doing! The colour was metallic British racing green

[Aragorn]

Originally Posted by herr_oberst

It was McLaren, back in the Marlboro liveried days of Senna and Prost, who began stripping all paint off bodywork between races. Ron Dennis would never present anything but an impeccable race car to the grid, and the paint was never more than one coat thick...
Then, the story the Capt. Ahab tells about the ultrathin panels! So typical of F1 where everything is taken to absolute extremes!!!

I remember the story of how Trans Am cars in the 70's were acid dipped to shed pounds from the bodywork. Seems like all series, where weight is an issue, experiment with ways to get the poundage down.

Mark Donohue - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Captain Ahab Jr]

Originally Posted by Won

Last summer, we did a re-fit of a new monocoque for a now defunct F1 team, after they smashed up the car at the last race before the summer shutdown. It was absolutely shocking how much body filler was in the old one, let alone the amount of paint. Worse yet, every void on any bonded component was full of adhesives. I know some smart engineers who worked there, and wonder how they felt about the shop guys undoing hours of hard work and grams saved in CAD

So that's what the other end of the grid is doing! The colour was metallic British racing green

Won, its VERY good you see the bad and the ugly as you start out on your motorsport but make sure you never ever compromise on weight unless it is for structural or stiffness reasons.

Most F1 teams will run a weight register on the painted parts, each part will have a unique life number. Weights before and after each paint will be recorded so as to check they don't get heavier as the season goes on with each time they are repainted. Before repainting the panel is taken back to as close to bare carbon as you can when dealing with carbon skin thicknesses thinner than a sheet of paper.

The painted weight register also makes it easier to make sure your heavier driver gets the lighter parts or your faster driver gets the lighter parts.

As I've gone off an a F1 paint tanget I'll keep going, some F1 teams don't paint their magnesium wheels to save on unsprung weight, about 75g/0.17lb a corner.

One big problem with painting carbon fibre is 'print through', this causes the surface to have a slight weave texture to it due to the difference between the stiffnes of the resin and carbon. kevlar, hybrid or whatever fibres are used.

For a perfect example of this look at any Ferrari F40, it has a 30 footer paint job, I'd still have one though as its the super car I most lust after. With the McLaren F1 road car painting it was a multi-step process about 7 stages from memory, one of the first steps was to paint the car with a hard shell of epoxy resin before flatting it back to a perfectly smooth finish.

Honeycomb cored panels require a lot of work to get flat as the carbon skin sinks a little bit into each cell of the honeycomb to create a golf ball effect and any holes in the outer skin are almost impossible to fill

I'll stop now as I'm starting to sound like a geeky paint weight wennie