rev up your engines, today I'm going to show you how this little machine can
keep you from getting ripped off if you're buying a used car
now this little carsys is a paint thickness gauge and it's a big deal
these days because car paint has gotten thinner and thinner here in the United
States we use mil thickness and a mil is a thousandth of an inch so you're
talking about really small and the space itself is taken up on modern cars by
various different processes sometimes as many as 4 coats
sometimes the metal is electric coated then it has a primer on top of that then
it has a color layer that you see and then there's a clear coat on top of that
but when you add them all together all these layers are only four to five mils
thick which is four to five thousands of an inch thick so you're having too much
stuff that you're playing around with and this is one of the reasons you
really can't get a modern car to look that good repainting it the factory
paint generally beats anything hands down because they're painted by machines
and the robots can measure it perfectly it's pretty hard to get at that exact
thickness unless you're a robot that's programmed and they measuring with
lasers and stuff they can get it really accurate so a modern paint job really
looks good from the factory that's where this little paint thickness gauge comes
in handy let's say you're buying a used car you can see if it's still got the
factory paint you can see if certain areas have been painted over very easily
like this first you just clean a little bit and wipe it dry in case there's
anything on there that's gonna make the measurement wrong then you just turn the
machine on its zeroing itself and stick it on here we go
and as you can see it's four point eight eight mils thick exactly between four
and five mils now I know this hood has never been repainted it's a factory
paint even though it's twelve years old somehow that's perfect but watch this
this fenders been repainted so let's see what it is
what's your here on a few spots this one's 4.8 this one's 5.85 and way down
here it's 6.0 so I know for a fact this
fender got mashed in and had to be replaced it was repainted as you can tell
the person who repainted it didn't do such a
hot job you got too wide of a range one part is six mil one is 4.8 it wasn't
painted all that well it looks okay well if you see it in the Sun you can see
that the color doesn't match either it's very hard to match colors no she faint
the old car nowadays it's almost impossible to totally match a 12-year
old car the old paint to the new paint but you can see here the variance is too
much it's been repainted so you bring something like this when you're buying a
used car you can check it all over that's basic we can't tell how thick to
paint is just by looking at it but this machine it just does a great job and
also as a zero correlation so you can redo it every once in a while so
you make sure that it's really perfect and it doesn't matter if it's
aluminum or iron steel the Machine calibrates itself so you want to make
sure it's working right turn it on and then put it flat there's no paint on it
so it should be zero there it is zero it's perfectly
calibrated zero Mills and that's for the iron steel weld it
was aluminum that's the same thing smart on off this machine it knows that's zero
to know if it does get off as an ages you just put it back on you push buttons
and you can recalibrate it so it's just zero when you put it on the flat model
now it only measures paint on metal surfaces there's still spoiler acts
fiberglass put it on it won't give you any reading because there's no metal
inside it just stays with lines means it's not reading it's really handy if
you're looking at a used vehicle if there's metal it's gonna read right now
let's say in this case which has been wrecked and bondo'd watch what happens
when we read it we stick it on 70.70 mils what does that tell it tells me
been bondo'd thick it's real thick so it's been bashed in bondo put on it and
then paint it over so you know you're getting a vehicle that's
recked had crappy bondo worked on on if you like it and it runs okay don't pay
too much you said all that Bondo's on there it's not still under there all
right who knows how much Bondo's all over the car you could check the whole
vehicle if you wanted like here and it's three point three so you know that's
more or less the real paint realize that manufactures use different paint
thicknesses on them so you get a base reading on your car and you find that
most of it is one reading like three point three and then all those are a
bunch more you know body works been done it's been repainted it can't hide the
paint thickness from this machine and if you really want to be a fanatic about
when your car's painted and you'll find out there's a big thickness difference
you can tell the guy you're gonna have to strip it down and repaint it you
didn't paint that car right much thicker on one part than the other means you
didn't do a good job when he painted the vehicle take my Celica I bought it for
300 bucks at various colors cuz it had been painted at a high school and the
paint was peeling off by the previous owner so I got one of these $400 paint
jobs and of course they're never gonna be perfect we'll check the top that's
6.85 way too thick well check the side that's 4.05 pretty good thickness but
really this was one paint job no cars painted at once the top is much thicker
than the side is we checked the back and that's only 3.22 the guy who painted
the car he was all over the place with the thickness of the paint, now it looked fine
years ago and I got painted it the first time but it's gonna fade deferentially so if
you're looking at a car and you got one of these gauges and you see these
readings all over the place you know it's been repainted you tell the guy hey
that's a crappy paint job in order to do that right you'd have to strip it down
paint it that's gonna cost thousands of dollars so you offer them a lot less
money and nobody can argue with its results because it's an accurate
scientific machine hey you can even bring those little pieces with you
to show people how accurate they are no one can argue this it's the truth about
paint on your car so if you're buying a used car or maybe you got in a wreck and
you got your car painted or you just got your car repainted one of these machine
can keep you from being ripped off big-time the truth is in this machine
measuring the thickness and this paint goes on modern cars guy said they're
getting thinner and thinner than the older one so it has to be done right and
this machine will tell you if it was done right or not and since its mechanic
Monday I'm giving away one of these cars paint thickness gauges to have a chance
to win place they're clean non-offensive comment on the youtube comments below
and a winner will be chosen randomly by computer get one of these cool paint
thickness gauges so you never get ripped off on body or paintwork again, so if you
never want to miss another one of my new car repair videos, remember to ring that
Bell