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.

Question

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

Answer 1

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.