How To Tint Clear Coat

I have used light coats of candy on bare metal, then clear. Candies are very transparent so they are perfect for this. I usually use a sanding disk on a grinder to give the bare metal texture and it looks great in the sun.

Yes. With traditional candy jobs, what you are seeing is a heavy layer of candy over a base (usually silver, gold, or white). But with this technique the bare metal is the base.

In these examples, the candy is built up to be intense, but lighter coats will yield a more subtle tint.

Scratcher09 said:

Yes. With traditional candy jobs, what you are seeing is a heavy layer of candy over a base (usually silver, gold, or white). But with this technique the bare metal is the base.

In these examples, the candy is built up to be intense, but lighter coats will yield a more subtle tint.

Oh I like those examples! So do you have to buy those products labeled as candy coat or can you just use a 2k clear with a tad of tint added?

You'll want to use a proper candy base and a proper finish clear. There's a difference between the finish clears, which are designed to give high film build and uv protection, and the base (or intercoat) clears/candies, which are designed for low film build and other qualities desirable in a base.

It's better to spray a candy then a clear, since any wet sanding done to a tinted finish clear will lighten the tint shade as the film thickness is decreased by sanding.

The chemistry of a clear coat is not designed to carry pigments. Modern clear coats are already very heavily laden with solids and it wouldn't surprise me a bit if adding pigment would cause those solids to begin to precipitate. This is one reason candies are so thin.

That being said; there's no harm in trying, right? If you're mixing clear and paint at a very high ratio (let's say 10:1) and the temperature is right and you shoot it right away, maybe it will be fine.

-Deek

What it boils down to is people much smarter than us have sat in a lab at Dow or 3M and figured out the best way for things to work. You can try to reinvent the wheel, but why not just buy the proper paints? Once you're spraying, you're spraying, and laying down the proper candy then clear is almost exactly the same order of steps as laying down a tinted clear then an untinted clear.

I agree with mathil. There are things that are meant to be added to clear like pearls (very fine powder). But anything liquid could alter the chemical reaction that makes urethane clears so durable. If tinting clears all in one step could be done safely, then I imagine I would have heard of it in the years I worked within the automotive refinishing industry. I, personally, don't like redoing a job more than once so I try to stick to the manufacturers recommendations. As I said earlier, I've used light coats of candies over properly prepped bare metal and then cleared with great results.

Have you tried going to an auto finish store and seeing what kind of candy they can mix up? I have one I deal with regularly and they basically add a "candy concentrate" to a neutral basecoat to mix up any color/intensity you want. If you try to buy off the shelf colors you're limited to the popular ones, but most stores can mix up anything custom.

Not that I would do this because I have good gun hardware but a cheap option would be to buy duplicolor anodize paint, paint 2 Coates then a bunch of clear coats on top.