Question:

What Texture and Thickness is Best for External Vehicle Body Coating?

Answer:

Depending on your specific use, spray on coatings may vary widely in texture and thickness. – Following the recent trend of applying bed liner to the outside of your vehicle saves you money and shows of the ruggedness of your auto. Doing these applications with a DIY kit requires a little bit of practice for a few reasons:

• It’s the OUTSIDE of your vehicle!! You don’t want to screw up
• You want to apply the perfect texture for washable yet rough look
• You want great adhesion for long term functionality
• Colors require a little bit more skill than black or grey

General rules for proper texture and thickness on external body bed liner – The things you want to control are total weight of product, durability, texture and color. So, the general rules (in order to keep this short) are:

• Keep your coating at < 40 mils (<1/25″ of an inch). Thicker application is generally reserved for truck beds since they need to be impact resistant. Exterior bedliner application is more for abrasion resistance.
• For durability you do not want to spray thinner than this because it will be too easy to chip/crack because of the coating being too thin.
• For texture you are going to want to work on creating a FINE orange peel, which does NOT look like a bed liner when you inspect closely.

The idea is that you want the dirt to be falling off of the vehicle. The more aggressive the texture, the less washable and the dirtier the vehicle will be. So, think SMOOTH with Little BUMPS.

You can do either a top coat or color all the way through the coating. If you are doing exact color matching, you will be using our Clear Bed liner as a top coat. This will attach to the more coarse underlying grey bed liner that is applied first to give you your texture and to keep cost down.

If you are tinting all the way through then typically, color matching will not work. In this case you have a range of colors to choose from. You can custom tint also, but there is NO WAY that the dry color will exactly match a paint code because the tint must be added to a powder that is colored already.