Tom
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well, I hope its perceived here as well as with you guys.. I just made the deal today to change our store over to valspar thru and thru. I’m throwing out prospray, and eventually transtar if the solvent system is as good as i hope it is.
I’m excited to make the switch, I think its going to be a slam dunk.
I have demo mixes to play with in the meantime, but all my customers are anxious to make the jump.
yea completes can be done in waterborne, I’ve done them too… I actually prefer water and will use it over solvent whenever I have the option.
as a jobber though I have to deal with a lot of stubborn customers who refuse to be open-minded to all the options available to them to complete whatever job they are working on… even if we offer them training to help them thru it.
I have some that get mad when the solvent doesn’t match, yet refuse to try waterborne when I know damn well it will get them where they want to go.
I have never heard of Urki, but then again Carworx hardly ever comes to visit me and I have never really had great success with their line due to pricing issues.
Matrix seems to be a pretty good line, my competitor sells it and I hear from the shops it offers good color match, but when I sampled it i had the same seediness issues that transtar had. I really wasnt overly impressed (still prefer water)
I’m about to dive into the valspar world and see how they are, its a unknown product around here and I’m anxious to see how it performs.
its not as simple as selling a product that works the way its supposed to, because there isn’t anything out there in a solvent solution that has coverage, color match, AND ease of spray-ability. the waterborne solutions all have excellent color match, and are easy to make lay down smooth, but don’t work well for completes and fleet jobs.
what Glen is going thru is it sounds like he has a booth setup that dupont is deeming unfit for water, which is kinda BS, since I have guys spraying water in the crappiest of booths and making it work. but anyway since he does big jobs waterborne would be too slow and non-productive. So he is using transtar nomix that has amazing coverage and speed, since its solvent but lacks in smoothness due to the 0 voc reducer needed to make it meet voc specs.
yes base is 3.5voc here…. problem is NO reducer will spray anything smoothly… its brutal…
the crazy part is I mixed no-mix into a transtar “slow” reducer thats 0 voc and it wouldnt even melt in… it looked like oil in water. The reason was they have to use the solvent oxol to make a slow speed reducer and isn’t very hot at all and does not melt the base.
Its all because they load up the products with acetone, which flashes the moment it comes out of the gun… even clears are brutal now in high humidity conditions… solvent pop is brutal now in the summer time. The High voc clears don’t skin over like the low voc do, and they can breath longer once sprayed which stops the solvent pop.
So the base when used according to specs end up spraying out like they are loaded with sand, and make for a really crappy finish.
which means we have been forced to essentially find creative ways to make it work.LOL yep!
All my no-mix customers keep a 5 gallon bucket of high VOC “contraban” under their mix table and swear by it… so i just let them do what they gotta do and sell the base. whatever works I guess….
here is the deal on prospray… coming from a jobber about to ditch them…
Prospray solvent is a direct carbon copy of Nexa. there is a toner for toner crossover chart which you can use to convert back and forth between the two systems. the solvent is pretty good for the money, and color match was the same as nexa. (since thats where the formulas where probly stolen from LOL) the low voc version of the system kinda sucks though, very low pigmentation in the mix and sprays like gravel guard on a blend.
Prospray waterborne is a great product as far as its chemical makeup. It sprays just like PPG and has/had good color match. The drawback to H2o is that there isn’t chips for all the variants, and they have been moving the old standard match formulas into a variant to make the water match the solvent chips in their variant decks. the problem with this is the water formulas where better match than the solvent so they essentially took a great matching system and wrecked it. I found this by accident when I had to paint my own car and ended up with a fender that does not match worth a crap. however a job i did on the same car a year earlier matched perfect using what was supposed to be the same formula… what I found out was my first mix had become the “lighter variant” and they made a new standard formula which was darker…
so in a nutshell.. prospray is a paint line with potential, but a lot of shortcomings at the organization level.
In my area PPG dominates. its a great product and has good color strength and great color match.
as far as sikkens, we had a shop calling us that used it any time he hit oranges and yellows, apparently they are weak and tough to achieve hiding. This shop had the sikkens system for about a year after he kicked basf out, then ended up kicking sikkens out due to the poor hiding and finally settled on a dupont system.
Cromax is a different animal, its plus is that it dries crisp and can be sanded easily. whereas the PPG has a flexible texture to it and is difficult to sand out if you need to. I can’t comment on sikkens on this issue.
I can say that a few years ago sikkens dominated here with the solvent systems, but now there is very little of it left, its all PPG and dupont.
What I like about PPG is how flat it dries. There is virtually NO texture to the dried finish when your finished basing, which makes for a nice smooth clearcoat finish. This is also great for blending.
I would have to agree with Ben on the service aspect more than anything.. but I would lean to PPG if possible, I have never heard of one being removed for another brand for performance issues.
also up here PPG is less costly to use compared to sikkens and dupont.
don’t the new voc laws rock?? nothing is easy anymore.
just for laughs, try using a virgin lacquer thinner. not gun wash as its a recycled product. its probably labelled as lacquer tool and equip cleaner. you should be able to get that no problem from any jobber.
I did that in a pinch one day and it turned out sweet. I had a G6 to spray for a guy and when I showed up to spray it he had no reducer. I managed to spray the whole car and do a color change in 1.25 quarts of LV37 black. the base laid down so nice and smooth it was amazing… even though its kind of a no-no, I find myself doing it from time to time now for things that aren’t important.
Just pour the thinners in a cup first and make sure its not really yellow, some of the thinners out there these days are pretty crappy. Its such a tight margin on that stuff that they always look for the cheapest stuff they can find to make the products out of.
See if you can let get your manager to let you experiment a little bit, and if you want to have a phone call sometime maybe I can give you a little assistance with your clear problem. I’m not sure what you mean by your clear issue but I think you mean die back which is something I hear about with dupont’s nason line down here. I’m betting your also fighting orange peel issues too with that clear too.
if its a Nason LVoc reducer it will perform identical to transtar or any other no voc reducer. All compliant reducers use a blend of the same 3 or 4 non-regulated solvents with the primary one being acetone. These solvents all flash off way too fast, which is what causes the seediness in what you spray. If you call a BASF jobber, ask for Limco LR-12 its a high VOC industrial reducer that’s primary ingredient is toluene, which is mostly what lacquer thinner is. the LR12 is water clear so no worries about yellowing. Its urethane grade.
The problem with the 0 voc reducers in no-mix is its the major reason for the delamination issues some have mentioned. what happens is you get a powder deposit on your base where it has dried and dry particles of paint have landed. its a real pain. I’ve sold hundreds of gallons of no-mix and had a hand full of delamination claims (about 4-5)
I don’t know who your jobber is out there, but ask around and see if anyone can sell you a urethane grade equipment cleaner, which is a 5 gallon pail of bulk reducer relabeled. if you can’t find any just message me and I’ll point you in the right direction. I know a couple big jobbers out in the GTA area.
you might also want to try southern poly clearcoat… I sell it in my store and its killer. It will outperform any other clear on the market, and I have the #’s to prove it.
Every shop I put it into never wants to use any other clearcoat. I’ve beat out glasurit, PPG, and premium dupont with southern. I have shops spraying 7-8 cars a day with it.
no dieback, not easy to pop, and really flexible yet easy to polish. Its a dream clear…from my experience the best way to fight the seediness when spraying is to use a “high VOC” reducer. There is a ton of it out on the market labelled as “premium equip cleaner” or “urethane equip cleaner”. Its just a re-labelling game to beat the regs but its really just old school reducer.
if you use that stuff, the base will lay down like a dream. also mix @ 1:1.5
we also found if you use Limco LR12 in it as reducer it works equally well. No bumpy texture at all.
also when spraying wa8555 black, to fight the brownness, mix in some blue. I use a custom mix of 90% LV37 and 10% LV02