Porsche Factory Paint Thickness

[brock911]

I have been doing searches for answers regarding the factory thickness of paint, specifically for Porsche automobiles.

Does anybody know what the Porsche factory tolerances are?

I have read that acceptable thickness in the 4.5 - 7.5 mil range are within factory specs?

What is acceptable and what is suspect?

Thanks,
Mike

[962porsche]

well 1st there is no tolerances for the mills unless your over the mil range .
then for what type of paint in what years of productions and for what stage like single stage , base clear , tri color .
the question is so vague there is no real answer .

the factory all factory's of auto makers use as little product as they can . this is for many reasons the 1st and for most is cost of materials then time .

if your looking to try and reproduce the amount of mils on a bare metal up repaint for get it ! it can not be done a human can not spray like a robotic arm can along with the spray heads of the systems (spray gun and robotic arm ) are nothing alike other then they both atomize the paint particles .

how ever on average for a base clear being the less mils out of them all (single stage , base clear and tri colors ) it would be some were around 5 mills . the difference is the amount of solids in the tints used to make up the color . silver being one of the lowest solids with tints in colors .


if you wondering at how many mills are to much and would need to be stripped . that would be 12 to 14 mils or more .

[brock911]

Thank you for your response 962porsche.

I'm trying to understand if the thickness of paint applied by the Porsche factory has a range. When I test using a paint meter I want to know if a reading is within tolerance or not, therefore knowing the range identifies a reading that is suspect.

Is it fair to use 7.5 mil as a max reading or is 8 more realistic?

Mike

[962porsche]

again it depends on what paint . type , stages , years old it is , year of the car that it was painted and so in .
but for the most part yes over 8 mils it's a repaint over the oe finish .

the thing is you can just look at a finish to see if it's a repaint 90 % of the time . and if you can't tell then you should have nothing to worry about because I would bet it's quality work .

there are different types of mil gauges to gage the mils of a finish .
a cheap one will cost 10 bucks were a real good one will cost a couple of hundred . so what it comes to finding out the real mils of a finish you would have to spend the least 100 dollars .
your going to get what you pay for when it comes to mill gauges . so a cheap one could be off by a mil or two . as i'm sure you know one mil is 0.001 " a magnetic gauge will not be all that good for being exact .
you could get a reading of say 9 mils when in fact there could be say only 6 on the car .