How to Mix Candy Color for Painting Brake Calipers

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Doug. I work with twenty great guys in St. Louis at Doug Jenkins Custom Hot Rods and we're going to do some work for you today on Expert Village. First step in painting the brake calipers is mixing the paint that we're going to use. The paint on these brake calipers is a candy color; a lot of the stuff we do is custom colors, so Andy is starting by mixing the lilac pearl candy that goes over it. So that's the actual pearl he's pouring in right now. The first material you saw him pour in there was a base coat that doesn't have pigment. It's just a suspension agent so we can spray the pearl purple on there really light. So when you look at it in the container there, you can see that the pearl is very thin, it hardly shows. Andy, what percentage did you mix it at? Andy: That was 5% Doug: Yeah, so we're mixing the candy at 5%. The suspension agent is 95% of what goes in the gun; the pearl is 5%. Now, he's putting in some reducer so he can make the paint thin enough to come out of the gun. We mix the pearl a little bit thinner than we need so we can put multiple coats on it; the heavier you put it on there the darker the pearl gets. So you need to mix it up real nice. So he'll get both his pearl and the black base coat mixed up in advance, before you start spraying. The base coat, when you mix it, has an infinite pot life; you can leave it in here for days and it's still perfectly sprayed able. So, you can go ahead and mix it ahead of time and have it ready for you."