why does car paint scratch so easily? You can leave an ugly mark with a piece of plastic that wouldn’t do anything to, say, wall paint or enameled kitchenware.
In: 1
Kitchenware doesn’t typically come with an optional “enamel protection package” for a nominal additional fee. It’s sort of the same philosophy as planned obsolescence for electronics.
Source: I sold Hyundais for a brief period. All our paint protection trainings stated this openly and shamelessly.
Enamel and paint are different beasts. Enamel is powdered glass, which you melt onto the object’s surface. So being able to enamel something is dependant on being able to heat it up the melting point of glass.
That’s too tricky to do for an entire car. Maybe you could heat up the entire car body to 1400°C in an oven, before you fit anything that isn’t steel and iron. But this isn’t really practical.
So cars are covered with paint, not enamel. We do the best when it comes to making the paints surface hard to reduce scratching, but there are limits to the chemistry when you are applying something as a liquid and letting chemistry happen as it dries.
There are different kinds of paint with different abilities.
Indoor paint can trade off “being waterproof and tolerant of a wide range of temperatures” with “ability to withstand scratches.” Enameled items require the ability to heat an object to crazy temperatures in order to apply, which doesn’t work for cars.
Car paint has prioritized things like “protect the car’s metal parts from rusting” and “being waterproof and stay attached to the metal under a wide range of temperatures.” There are also cost concerns that have reduced the thickness of the layer of paint on the car.
The paint on your kitchen has color all the way through, so if you scratch it you don’t notice. Car paint has a layer of color covered by a clear coat. If you scratch the clear coat you notice because of the way light shines through.
Latest Answers