The key to excellent paint lies in hours and hours of sanding, even after the color coats are applied. Black paint highlights any flaws, making each buffing step more critical.
“We always start with black primer,” explains British-born Californian Mick Jenkins, whose business in Pomona, Mick’s Paint, shoots the term “high-end” up beyond the stratosphere. “That stuff shows everything. Every flaw, every screwup, everything that must be fixed.”
This story originally appeared in Volume 24 of Road & Track.
In his custom shop is a 1966 Chevrolet Chevelle. GM slammed together more than 400,000 of them. One of Vice President of Design Bill Mitchell’s best efforts, it’s a ’63 Buick Riviera refined with Chevy sensibilities. From the trailing edge of the door to the rear bumper is a vast fender, subtly sculpted. The fenders from Chevrolet were somewhat straight. This one is perfect. Painted PPG Jet Black, it’s a massive, optically impressive mirror. Black is an automotive painter’s great challenge. “We prep all the cars to the same level,” Jenkins continues. “It doesn’t matter if it’s white, green, or yellow; they all get the same treatment. Our big problem is if someone comes in and says, ‘I don’t want to spend a hundred grand,’ I can’t do it. Because that’s what we do. If you want less than that, we just don’t do it.”
Imperfect black is as easy to spray on as any color. A 12-ounce can of Krylon Fusion All-In-One spray paint is $7.98 at Lowe’s. Perfect black? You’re looking at $15,000 for just paint and materials, Jenkins says. “The average color—not the primer or the clear—is $1000 a gallon,” he explains.
“Black is not considered a color,” according to Frank Jemiola, PPG’s automotive refinish global technical manager for color platforms. “It is referred to as ‘achromatic,’ and that covers anything that isn’t a true color. That makes it relatively easy [to produce]. The difficulty is that there are so many different types of ‘carbon black’ pigments. You have to really understand what the requirement is for the finished product and how those different types of carbon blacks interact with the resin system that the customer is working in, whether that’s water or solvent.”
Paint formulations must also meet environmental regulations. “It’s driven by VOC [volatile organic compounds] limits,” Jemiola says. “The easiest way to meet a VOC limit is by using a waterborne technology.” Once, water-based paints were considered inferior. Jenkins says the low-VOC stuff is so good now that you can’t tell the difference.
“Black has what they call a low reflectance value,” Jemiola explains. “It will show off defects more so than any other color.” The trick is not to have defects.
Applying award-level paint is trickier than just pulling the trigger and waving around a spray gun.
Control over a car’s finish at Mick’s Paint means he doesn’t accept works in progress. “It’s been an issue,” Jenkins asserts. “If someone says, ‘My car is in primer, it’s ready to paint’”—Jenkins shakes his head. “Because if what you’ve got underneath it is wrong, it’s going to be highlighted. And the story will be that ‘My car was painted at Mick’s.’ That’s not going to work.”
At Mick’s, the first step is stripping off the old paint, either by hand or using some form of pneumatic-powered media blasting. For old cars, that involves removing ancient lacquers and decades of body filler and turning panels originally stamped on the cheap into sculptures worthy of over 1000 hours of work. Once a body is at bare metal, it gets an epoxy sealer to protect it until the next step, which can take weeks or months, depending on the schedule.
Paintwork is, always, bodywork. And that includes body filler. “Lead was originally used because there wasn’t plastic filler,” Jenkins expounds. “In reality, everything pretty much gets a ‘candy coat.’ It might be super thin. Some people would rather primer the car six times, but primer’s not meant to be stacked, and filler is. It’s the final step of making it straight before we prime it. We spend a whole lot longer getting the body shape before going to primer.”
Born in the U.K., Mick Jenkins came stateside in 1995. Black gold: The good stuff runs $1000 a gallon. Even a small spill is expensive.
And then there’s the sanding at every step, even after the color goes on. Black paint makes sanding that much more necessary. “The color-sanding is more difficult just because you can see everything,” says Jenkins. “It’s probably at least 40 percent more time. That Chevelle, just to do the body shell, is two and a half to three weeks of work. That’s just color-sanding the body shell. That’s without the fenders or the hood. Just the shell.”
When it’s time to actually throw on paint, Jenkins makes it sound simple compared with the other steps. “The booth is just a box.” After sanding, the primer is the first coat, followed by five or six color coats with 15 minutes between each one. “Then you clear it, and we typically put six coats of clear on it, straight on top of one another.”
Six-figure paint jobs are rare. Black paint in general is common. An obvious difference in application is that, on new-vehicle assembly lines, robots spray the paint. Meanwhile, paint shops, from high-end boutiques like Mick’s to discount chains like Maaco, rely on human beings holding guns to put product on metal. Factory finishes are usually kiln-dried quickly at high temperatures, while a shop will typically let paint cure in ambient conditions.
In 1966, a Chevrolet Chevelle cost less than $3000. This one is in the final steps of a six-figure paint job. The crew at Mick’s starts their workday at 5 a.m. Most of the labor happens even before the primer goes on, with hours of stripping, sanding, and smoothing with filler.
There’s no secret to black paint, even if there’s plenty of mystery about the void black can represent. It takes effort and expertise. The 51 people working at Mick’s start their day at 5 a.m., and no one seems to break their concentration. It’s a younger group, many of whom were trained at Mick’s. What makes a great paint job is effort.
Off the clock, Jemiola drives a black Chevy Colorado. “It still has the original paint,” he says, “a standard General Motors color, which has a number of other components in it. It’s not just a single-pigment black.” But he does think he could improve his truck’s paint job: “I’d go with a much different type of black, very, very high-end. If I had my druthers, I’d probably repaint it one of the Deltron blacks that we have on the market.”
Meanwhile, Jenkins is undertaking a personal project. “The bastard child of a 427 Cobra and an E-type,” he claims. He will paint it black.
John Pearley Huffman
Senior Editor
John Pearley Huffman has been writing about cars since 1990 and is getting okay at it. Besides Road & Track, his work has appeared in Car and Driver, the New York Times and more than 100 automotive publications and websites. A graduate of UC Santa Barbara, he still lives near that campus with his wife and two children. He owns a pair of Toyota Tundras and two dogs. He used to have a Nova and a Camaro.
