Just in the event any Forum Members like me, also own a 2011 Camaro SS in Red Jewel Tintcoat (I live in Houston). Do Bear with me, as this is a bit of a LO>>>NG story
I recently had a problem with my Paint. When returning from the "Valeting Company" I use, when half way home, I noticed rainspots still on my Passenger side window, but thought I would clean it myself when I got home. While cleaning I noticed the rainspots were also on my paint. Got some mild abrasive polish, and tried to clean it to no avail. On Monday took it to the Dealership, who inspected, and together we deduced that, on my way to work early of a morning, a sprinkler system somewhere, sprayed water onto my car, and then with it sitting in the sum all day, had baked the water stain into my paintwork. I was to take my car in the following day and they would buff it out at MY expense as it was not considered a Manufacturer Paint problem. Took it in the following day and at 6.00pm phoned to see if my car was ready to pick-up. Was told they would have to hold on to the car as they had a serious problem, while buffing the car they noticed a Red residue on the Buff Pad, which apparently should not happen, as it should have been the Clearcoat surface they were Buffing, with minumum color residue. They said they were flying a specialist down from Detroit the following morning to evaluate the problem. We were later told that the car had not been given the required Clear Coats, but this story does vary later, to "the Clear Coat had not dried correctly". Anyway the gist of all this is, they had to buff out the rainspots, Repaint and Clear Coat the full car. The warning is "In HOT Areas" take care with water from Sprinkers, and dry off A.S.A.P. to help eliminate this problem. Originally the Paint Job on my car was so Fantastic, you would have sworn it had been given multiple coats of Clear Coat, BUT ???.
This MAY be an inherent Fault on this Color Camaro. ????
Ths MAY however apply in varying degrees with other cars "DO TAKE CARE", I don't know what I would do if it happened to any of my 2 Crossfires, probably commit suicide.
AGAIN TAKE CARE.

 

I worked for a major automotive paint manufacturer for many years, up until just a few years ago. I can tell you some things about your story.

1) Being a tri-coat, there would be some clear on your car - the base coat, then there is a red candy mid coat, then clear would go over that. ... but the red candy is also a "clear".

2) It seems impossible with the manufacturing process and the quality and inspection processes that the clear coat would be missed. - however, red on the buff pad would indicate exactly that. It sounds like they were buffing the mid-coat.

3) "The clear didn't dry properly" is bullshit. If there was clear on there and it didn't dry properly, it would be gummy or otherwise obvious. If it dried fine on every other car on that production run, it would dry fine on yours.

4) The parts of the car are not painted in the same place. They don't even use the same paint. Everything plastic is manufactured by another company, painted, then sent to the manufacturing facility. Bumper covers, mirrors, door handles, ground effects, spoilers, gas door covers. Those companies might use PPG, DuPont, Sherwin-Williams, Sikkens or any other paint company. The factory will us one of the paint companies too, but not necessarily the same one anyone else is using. That is one of the primary reasons the bumper covers on cars almost never match the rest of the vehicle.

SO... if you had the problem with the paint all over your car, it doesn't make sense at all, since it would not all be the same paint, AND, not everyone would have managed to miss the final clear coat, or had the same problems with it.

5) Acid rain will etch into the clear over time, but normal water isn't going to create a lasting problem, especially not over that short a period of time.


The whole story is just really unusual and doesn't make any sense... but, as long as they are taking care of it for you, all is good. : )

 

Hope you get it all worked out. But, anthing is possible with a Chevy... BTW, One of the first cars I smoked with from a dead start with my new V8 was a new SS Camero.

 

lol anddddd slap to the face hahaha... rough group on xfire forum lately haha.

 

I was just kiiding around. I grew up racing Fords so the old Chevy vs. Ford thing kicks in sometimes. I actually really like the looks of the new Camero and glad to see them being built again along with the Chanllenger. It was getting kind of lonely out on the streets for the Mustangs.

 

Sprinkler water can damage any paint. It just shows up worse on dark colors. When we lived in central PA, the local aquifer was chock full of limestone and therefore contained high levels of dissolved calcium carbonate which made for a base rather than acid Ph. Pretty much everyone had supplemental water treatment in their homes even when hooked up to city water as we were.

I had my first exposure to limestone saturated water the first time I left our cars out when the lawn irrigation system was on. Oops, never again. One exposure was all it took to create a full day's work to get those spots buffed out.

Up to that point, I had kept the valve in our water treatment system switched to treat only the water used inside the house. After my day of buffing, I said screw it and switched the valve over to treat all incoming water. The cost of water treatment salt was relatively inconsequential compared to my time and the potential damage to any cars caught in the sprinkler's path.

Now that we live in CT, the water here flows through granite for the most part and there are far less dissolved minerals to worry about. Still, we always garage the cars and I keep a chamois in the trunk of each car. It comes in handy for all kinds of stuff. I'm particularly neurotic about my wife's jet black Infiniti. Black cars are a love/hate relationship.

 

I don't believe it. This is the same type of problem that I and alot of other folks had had with the late 80's GM's. I had an 87 Park Avenue with white spots in the clear on a dark green paint. Those eventually coalesced into a fading spot that was really big, one stripe right down the roof. Even though I bought the car with 28K on it from a buddy, they still after I fought them on it repainted the car and paid for half of it. At that time the sort of acknowledged that they had been changing paint formulas. That sounded BS to me too. anyway, look down the road and you'll see lots of those from other mfg's too with the paint peeling,Chrysler mostly with the peeling, but this one and most gm's did not, they just had big fading spots on them, Pontiacs seemed to be the worst. But thta's how it started out, just seeing like wwhite transluscent spots under the clearcoat, but seemingly above the paint.

 

I too have a friend in the paint business, and would have to agree with JJ on this one. But, they did take care of it....so that is good. Chevy always seems to have paint problems for some reason...I had wheels on a '92 Camaro that faded within a year, they painted them twice under warranty. I finally had them done myself...glad it worked out...

 

Yeah, Chevy has had its challenges with paint over the years. I never understood it as I assumed all the manufacturers were buying relatively similar technology from a relatively small pool of suppliers like Dupont. I suppose it comes down to how well you apply the technology you've bought.

I can remember a young woman who worked for me as her first job after college in the late 90's. She drove a Chevy Beretta that I think was from the early part of the 90's. Anyway, the damned thing looked like a Pinto horse. The paint was discolored in huge patches.....at first. Then it started to peel.....in huge patches. The thing looked like crap but she had bought it used and had no recourse with GM. And being a young, poor, recent grad, she didn't want to put her meager discretionary cash into that car. So she just drove it that way for a few years. We used to make fun of the car around the office but the damned thing never actually died. It just looked like a leprosy patient on life support.

After that first hand experience with her Beretta, I started to pay attention to them on the road. I noticed that a lot of them seemed to have paint problems. It didn't seem like all Chevy's had the problem, just the Beretta and its 4 dour cousin the Corsica. Yet another reason my wife wants nothing to do with domestic cars.

 

Yes... GM had a huge problem with delaminating in the early 90's! What you were seeing was the primer showing through.

As for what the manufacturers use... first of all, no matter what they use, if the surfaces are not prepped properly, the best paint in the world isn't going to work.

Next, the manufactures aren't looking for the best product, they are looking for speed. That's why pretty much all vehicles have orange peel in their clear. The way to lay out clear and have it end up smooth as glass is to give it time to lay out - i.e., slower dry times. They want the clear to dry fast, so it doesn't have time to lay out properly and you end up with orange peel.

Saying they use PPG, DuPont, Sherwin-Williams or whomever doesn't matter - all the paint companies make various qualities of paint products. The manufacturers are generally not using the top shelf products. There is no reason for them to do that, and the cost can be significantly different.

 

On a modern base/clear paint system the color coat won't hold a gloss so if the paint job was some how missing the clear coat the paint would have looked horrible to start with. If they had buffed through the clear and started getting down to the base coat then that would have been very apparent just looking at the surface. There are tinted clear coats out there today, and they will transfer a minimal amount of color to an applicator pad since, well, there is pigment in those clears. But if you've ever worked on these vs a true single stage paint, you know that the applicator gets lightly tinted by a tinted clear, but it changes color completely when working on single stage paint.

Without having seen the actual finish and without having worked on myself, it's darn near impossible to say what was really going on with it.

There are problems that arise in the painting of cars from time to time, even at the factory level. It is possible that the drying oven was not up to proper temperature, the paint was mixed wrong, etc. Factory clear coats are very unique blends, at least relative to what a body shop would use. Factory paints must be oven baked for a certain period of time at a certain (fairly high) temperature. Factory body parts are paint long before assembly. A body shop couldn't afford the equipment, and the leather, vinyl and plastics on a car in the shop for collision repair would never survive that oven. The point being, if something went wrong during a factory paint job it is quite possible that the paint could still look normal and behave fairly normally under normal conditions. "Normal conditions" being what the average owner would do with the car - run it through a car wash one a week, maybe wash in his own driveway, throw a coat of wax on it a couple times a year, etc.

But once a shop tried to aggressively rotary buff the paint, putting some heat into it, it's possible that the defect shows it's ugly head. We had such a situation when our COO wanted to have the orange peel removed from the factory paint job of his black BMW M3 Coupe - after wet sanding it we found that no matter what we did, no matter how long, how aggressively, how anything.... the sanding marks kept coming back. We got in touch with our representatives on the East Coast, in Montreal, and in Germany and what we discovered was that BMW had a paint issue in the factory the week this car was built. But the paint looked and performed just as you would expect, unless or until you wet sanded it and then tried to compound out the sanding marks. There had been either a mix or cure issue and once the paint was "cut into" the can of worms was open and you were basically screwed. We heard of two other identical cases involving cars built during that same week. Whether the issue was confined to a day, a week or longer is not clear, but it was a factory issue.

Getting a car company to stand behind a paint job can be very difficult since it's so easy for them to find fault with what the owner did as it's easy to jack a paint job nine ways to Sunday if you don't know what you're doing. The fact that Chevy was so quick to offer a complete respray tells me they have a known issue and all they had to do was cross reference your VIN and bingo - claim approved.