Auto Body Painting for the Beaches

The lake side and the street side

Stand at the top of a Beaches side street on a bright afternoon and look at the parked cars. On the ones that have lived there a while, the side that faces the lake is a shade lighter than the side that faces the porches. It is not imagination. A car parked nose-to-Queen shows its south flank to the sun off the water all afternoon, to the fog every mild morning and to the brine thrown up from Lake Shore on every winter drive, and the clear coat on that flank ages faster than the other. Roofs and hoods go first on dark colours, as they do everywhere; here the lower doors and the rocker on the lake side go next, hazed by a winter of salt and a summer of glare.

None of this matters until one panel needs paint. Then it matters completely, because a door sprayed to the code on the plate will match neither side of the car it is bolted to.

Matching on a card, not on the plate

The code on the door jamb narrows the search; it does not end it. A single code may have half a dozen formulas in the mixing system, one for each time the factory shifted its supplier or its line, and years of Beaches weather have moved your car away from all of them. So our estimator mixes the nearest few, sprays each on a card, and compares the cards against the panel beside the repair, outdoors, on the side of the car the repair is on. Whichever card cannot be found against the panel is the formula. Metallics and pearls get a second test for how the flake settles, because two cards of the same mix can read differently depending on how far the gun was held.

The colour is then feathered onto the adjacent panels so the eye crosses from old to new without finding a seam, and the clear goes over the whole run in one pass. A failed roof or hood is a different job: nothing to blend, since the panel has its own edges, so the dead clear is stripped, the surface sealed and the panel finished as one piece, which means it weathers at one rate from here on.

• Formulas sprayed on cards and judged outdoors on the repaired side
• Feathered into the neighbouring panels, clear in one pass
• Roofs and hoods finished whole when the clear has failed

Curing by the lake, and the first month after

Fresh paint hardens over weeks, not hours, and the Beaches is a damp place to do it. The booth bakes the panel, but the last of the cure happens on your street, and for that first month we ask a few things: keep wax off it, keep it out of the brush wash, keep the scraper off it, and rinse by hand when brine starts to crust on the lower doors. Sap from the big maples on the side streets marks soft clear more readily than old, so a spot in the sun beats a spot under a tree if the street gives you the choice. Winter adds a day or so, because the panel arrives cold and the booth has to warm it before anything can be sprayed.

A single blended panel is usually a few days in the booth. Drop the car in the morning by Lake Shore and the parkway, take the subway back to Woodbine, and collect it when we call. The refinish carries a lifetime warranty in writing.