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Honda factory paint finish - is it baked on?

brettmarl

brettmarl

Regular Contributor
Took boat to a yard (that is a Honda dealer) recently for bottom paint and an oil change (while I was there...). They made a mistake and ended up bottom-painting both my lower units. They are apologetic and are offering for me to bring it back in and have them restore the Honda paint.

Presumably this would entail sanding off the bottom paint and then rattle-can of the Honda paint and topcoat. I am skeptical however that this would end up as durable as the original paint and may not last. My bottom paint so far has been pretty bomb-proof as motors spend 99% of their life tilted-up out of the water.

Anyone have thoughts on how to achieve a comparable factory-finish - would the units needs to be stripped-down to the shell and paint baked on in an auto-shop?
 
I'm not sure about baked on or not. When I had my motor cover repainted on my BF 225, the guy that did it put on three coats of clearcoat. That has held up very well since it was done about 6 years ago. So, however you paint it, apply lots of clearcoat.

On another note, when I dock on my lift, I'm often confronted with a low tide, so the paint on my lower end, especially the skag, often gets scraped up a good bit and the paint gets scraped off. After repainting it with the Honda spray can paint several times, I gave up and found a really tough galvanizing paint, and used that. Obviously, it doesn't match the Honda oyster gray, but so what? It works fine and I simply have a two-tone grey lower end. Who looks at that anyway?
 
Just a guess but I bet the paint application technique used by Honda originally is electrostatic spray. Not sure how easy it will be to find a "consumer" type operation that would do a small job like that. Going back to "original" might not be realistic. Your auto body type baked on idea might be as close as you're going to find.

Good luck.
 
Thanks. Sounds like spraying might achieve decent results. The more I read about baked-on vs air-cured - it seems baking just accelerates the air-curing time and is mostly used to reduce time on the production-line vs. achieve better results. Electrostatic sounds like achieves a much better / smoother finish - but not necessarily more durable. I suspect many top coats is the key as @chawk_man wisely suggests.
 
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