It's an honest question and yes I researched.

Actually there's nothing to research, the terms just keeps dropping like they're self explanatory, and I think they are but what the fu%%$# do they really mean; how to use them; in what order ..etc

I bought BMW touch up paint and it came in two tubes. 1-Basecoat; ie the paint color of my car and 2- clear lacquer.

Now, the instruction on the back said something like; paint the area with lacquer. Paint the topcoat (after drying )with clear lacquer.

Now, is the lacquer mentioned first, different from the clear lacquer that supposed to go on the topcoat.

What does lacquer do? make the paint shine?

Someone mentioned that the paint on his car is a clearcoat. How many types of freaking paint are there?

Clearcoat is like a clear nail polish applied to protect the actual paint and to make it shiny. It's the last coating applied when the car is painted. And when the "clear" is fully dry you buff it out to bring the luster of the finish.

to make this really straight forward you have 2 bottles. They are both l.aquer paints but one is the base coat and one is the clear coat....The base coat laquer is the color of your car...the clear coat which serves many purposes is exactly as is sounds.. a clear coat of paint that adds gloss, shine, protection and when you car gets scrated its mostly the clear coat .. you get what i mean ?

Most paints consist of pigments resins and solvents (water). The resin provides the coating material, with the pigments creating the desired colour (in the case of a clear coat there is no pigmentation) and solvents (an emulsion of water / oils) reduce the material to a workable viscosity.

Automotive paints usually comprise- a base coat, colour coat (s) and a polyurethane clear coat that is provided as protection (including protection from ultra violet radiation (UVR) which has an approximate thickness of 1.5 – 2.0 Mils, removing more that 0.3 – 0.5 Milsof clear coat may cause premature paint film failure.

It's an honest question and yes I researched.

Actually there's nothing to research, the terms just keeps dropping like they're self explanatory, and I think they are but what the fu%%$# do they really mean; how to use them; in what order ..etc

I bought BMW touch up paint and it came in two tubes. 1-Basecoat; ie the paint color of my car and 2- clear lacquer.

Now, the instruction on the back said something like; paint the area with lacquer. Paint the topcoat (after drying )with clear lacquer.

Now, is the lacquer mentioned first, different from the clear lacquer that supposed to go on the topcoat.

What does lacquer do? make the paint shine?

Someone mentioned that the paint on his car is a clearcoat. How many types of freaking paint are there?

Basically: BMW's have 4 coats of product on their sheet metal.

1. Primer coat
2. Sealer
3. Color coat
4. Clear coat

One of the lessons I recently learned was just how thin all these coats represent. Using a paint guage, most BMW's read 5.0 Mils in thickness for factory paint. I had a body shop give me a graphic example of 5 Mils using a piece of bare metal (simulating the sheet metal) and a piece of ordinary bond paper. The paper read 5.0 Mils. So, you are working with color touch up and clear which represents approx. 1/2 the total thickness of a factory paint job.

For touch up's, you need to put the color coat down first, then apply the clear to protect the color coat. A lot of touch up paints are laquer because they dry extremely fast at room temp and can be "leveled" by polishing the area so the chip disappears.

Hope that helps...

Toto