What is orange peel (sorry, kinda of new to detailing)??

 

Orange peel is that texture you see on an orange on the paint. Look at an orange, look at the texture on the outside, thats what the paint would look like. Its from spraying paint too dry.

 

it also can be cause by a cheap spray gun, poor prep work, or an unexperienced painter.

-Tom

 

If you look at a car with orange peel (almost any car) the reflections appear wavy and unsharp. This is because the clearcoat is not perfectly smooth, which distorts the reflections.

 

There are many things that can cause orange peel,
Not quite enough product applied,
Air pressure too low,
Not enough reducer, wrong reducer or mix ratio incorrect,
Incorrect gun setup,
Baked too soon / or accelerated too much,
Too much product applied,
Basically listed in order of likelihood. Even a $50 gun can lay down a glassy coat of paint when it's used by an experienced painter. I have cheapo $75 gravity feed's for general use, and $500 DeVilbiss's for the important jobs. I have repainted brand new $180,000 Peterbilts with the cheapie gun, and it looked better than factory.

What it comes down too, is orange peel, when excessive, is simply a crappy paint job. Every paint job has some degree of it, it's the nature of sprayed paint, but if it looks like cottage cheese, whoever painted it probably doesn't know what they're doing.

 

 

you can see the roughness around the reflected light. Thats orange peel

 

What can be done to take care of it? Is there anything you can do that not's too drastic or doesn't cost as much as a new paint job?

 

There isn't much you can do short of a new paint job. Even the new paint job would probably have orange peel.

 

Wet sand no?

 

I suppose wetsanding could repair orange peel somewhat, depending on how serious the orange peel is.

 

Wetsanding is exactly how you fix orange peel. Usually, if you want a top quality paint job, you'd want the paint color sanded. Basically before clear coat, the actual paint would be wetsanded down to be flat to eliminate any imperfection. But doing this requires more paint to be layed down since you'd be sanding some away. Same goes when you lay down the clear, you'd want to wetsand, but with a higher grit. Then follow up with a compound and polish and that thing would be shining.