If you're in the market for an inexpensive paint thickness gauge
then stay tuned because this video is for you !!!!
Good day everyone Garageking here and today I'm going to do a review
on a paint thickness gauge I bought so let's take a look at what I got in
the mail so this one's by R&D
instruments, it does say it's got an accuracy
of 2.5 percent backlight built in and it's from 0.1 um
micron to 1500 microns and it says auto
uh f-e-n-n-f so that means ferrous and non-ferrous
so like steel and aluminum basically so let's see what this thing is about
let's take it all out of the box I don't want to drop it
I didn't pay a lot for this one because I know these paint gauges can get up to
like a lot of money so this one I paid about
44 to 45 USD for so it actually didn't cost me
that much money so it was great !!! Wait i guess we need batteries okay
so we're gonna have to put some batteries in it
let's see what else it came with here so we have coding thickness guide user
manual Russian I recognize that so that's
good so it even has a Russian manual so if anyone speaks Russian, this was a
really good deal and then it has
i guess these are just for testing it so standard ferrous so this would be a
steel plate what is this one standard aluminum so
an aluminum plate and then i guess a whole bunch of
different thickness plastic just to see
for doing the depth oh yeah so we got 500 100
250 50 1000 so a bunch of different thicknesses so we can
test it so you know what let's test it
so it takes four AA's (size of battery)
and it turns on i guess it's zeros and there's our microns
our mill so mill, microns whatever scale you want to use
fe must be ferrous
single reading and I guess continuous reading so let's see how accurate this
thing actually is so i'm gonna remove the standard
ferrous which is the steel so let's take this out
and put that right there and now what we can do is
from our which which one should I pick guys which one should I pick
let's pick this one first thousand so that's that's actually fairly thick
so we'll lay it on top okay now let's turn our machine on our instrument
there we go let it zero and then so this should read a thousand when I
when I put it on wow that's pretty close all right and
now that it's at a thousand i guess if I
want to convert it to mill that would be the same as
oh i guess it doesn't convert so then you'd have to remeasure it in mil that's
fine
39.3 mil okay so that's pretty good now let's go
to the continuous and let's see if we kind of move it
around if it oh yeah i guess we can move it around
until we get a
good reading okay so let's go back to our
micron and we should be at a thousand so for continuous and then once we get
there we go wow so this thing is uh very accurate
but you know what that was a thousand so it's pretty thick
so let's make this work a little harder let's take our
thousand away and let's bring it down to what do you think next
500 now still too thick uh maybe maybe 250 okay sure yeah okay
guys we'll do 250. all right let's do 250. so let's let it
zero itself out there we go and we want
our reading so this one's a 250 257 interesting okay so it's pretty
accurate now what if we go to continuous because maybe is the
plastic not perfect so 257
256 258 259 okay so that's pretty good now let's
just quickly let's just go to the thinnest one 50
microns so this is like super super thin so i think paint is thicker than
this so let's uh should be at 50.
wow that's pretty good so that's uh definitely quite accurate
for sure and i moved it there so let's see if I
that's really well now it did say it's auto detect so let's keep this
fine sheet here and let's take out the standard aluminum
and let's check it with the standard aluminum
and let's see if it auto detects so that's the aluminum
and now we're going to put it on the aluminum so now
because right here we can see it says fe for ferrous
so let's see if it goes to aluminum oh it did
it went nf which is uh non-ferrous it's maybe not as accurate 47.5 but
that's still really good we're only 2.5 off so that's
still still really really good now i should
know when you have it on the singular one
if you're if you're really quick and kind of sloppy you can actually get a
wrong reading you put it like this look at that it's 110
and then now when i set it down it stays at 110 it doesn't adjust so it's almost
better to put it at the continuous so this way if you're kind of sloppy here
you know you're moving around it'll move around until you actually
put it right on it so there we go it's 49 there we go 50 which is what the
what the pad was now the thing with this we have to remember too
our units of measurement so microns that's one thousandth
of a millimeter and mils which is one thousandth of an inch so
either metric or imperial so that's great so now let's take it outside to my
truck and let's see what we get okay so we're out
here at the truck and we're gonna measure
my toyota paint thickness
94.7 microns which you know that's pretty good because uh
paint from the factory is about a hundred and the clear coat's usually 35
to 50 which is half of that so this thing is actually pretty uh
pretty accurate now you know what would be interesting
let's see i painted a hood let's go check it out because i know i
put extra clear coat on the hood here's the hood that i painted now I did like
2-3 layers of clear coat when I was painting it to make it nice and
thick so this should be thicker than 100 for sure so let's check it out
there we are 264 so this is thick paint because i know i put a lot of clear coat
so this is actually uh it's really good now let's go
to the factory paint where I did not touch it, here the factory this
should be very thin because we're actually losing clear here
well there we go it's about a hundred now let's go to here
where we're losing some clear
89 yes put the clear coat really thick on these wheels when I painted them so
let's see what these wheels say
oh yeah 430. now if we look at the paint on the front of this honda we can see
we're actually losing clear coat now the clear coat's still there
so let's take a measurement and see what uh
see what happens here let's try to get it down
where we can uh should be pretty thin 77 - 80 that's right now let's try to
move it over to a place where the clear coat still here
should be closer to 100 maybe there we go
so I'd say this is a really good really good paint gauge
let's check the paint thickness on my motorcycle see what happens
and yes motorcycle paint is a little bit thicker so 127 microns
let's convert that or let's see if we can go so how many mils would that be
well let's see so about five mil thickness let's check
the thickness of my paint on my snow blower
35 microns what about a shop tool this is powder coated it's a
shop tool about 27 microns what about my air
compressor let's check this thing powder coated as well i expected around 30
range I guess like the rest oh a little bit thicker on the air
compressor close to 50 microns now what about this catch can this catch
can is um what's the word i'm looking for
anodized!!! Okay so it should be really really thin
so it's not a ferrous material let's see and there we are it's only 14 it's just
anodized so the thickness is uh really thin
and that's it "nf" for non-ferrous so this thing works
this thing works great let's see uh what about the supercharger part here
oh quite a bit thicker and it's aluminum cover so
nf so that's great non-ferrous so this machine or this instrument it's
uh R & D let's just call it zoom in R&D
instruments model numbers "TC200" I have to give it
some big thumbs up because it uh to me this works great and when i'm
doing detailing this we all know how much clear coat I'm
stripping off a vehicle so i think this is a really good tool to
have and you know what it didn't cost me that much it was about 45 USD
That's not a lot of money and that included shipping and I'm in Canada
I'll cut in to prevent myself from rambling but basically in a nutshell
this is a really good tool now as i say at the end of all my videos
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