What is 'Blending'? and why is it sometimes necessary?

Why do you have to blend undamaged panels?

To some, explaining why we need to ‘blend’ seems obvious, others believe they are being scammed. However, in most cases, blending is a necessary step in the refinish process for a flawless, undetectable finish. I will explain in a little more detail the necessity below.

It all starts at the factory from your manufacturer. Increasing robots are used due to efficiency and an element of cost saving, but humans are used in some cases. The difficulty is every method produces a different colour. Metallic and pearlescent paints especially give a different effect dependant on several factors; How heavy it is applied and at what pressure it is applied, to name just two.
Light application causes metallic to sit at the top, causing more reflection. Heavy application and the colour will appear darker with the metallic flake sitting at the bottom.

Moving onto the paint manufacturers, once they have made a new colour, they take a sample to paint manufacturers to be re-created. But to make things worse, manufacturers may stipulate that a specific sample is to be used in Europe, if the car was manufactured in Asia then use this sample. But the bumpers are manufactured and pre-painted in the USA, so use this sample. Therefore, paint manufacturers may produce 10 or more variants/shades of the same colour.

So, out of those 10 shades it is up to the painter to choose the best match for your vehicle. Once they have decided this, their next challenge is to think what pressure it was applied at? how heavy? If this isn’t correct, the metallic pigment will not lay the same, causing the colour to look ‘off’ in certain lights. To demonstrate this, at the bottom of this page is a photo of 4 x painters spray out cards. This is in fact all the SAME colour, but different shades. These were all applied at the same pressure and consistency, the variation would be significantly more.

With black vehicles it is less a lot less obvious than lighter metallic paints such as silver, red, light blue etc. If you wanted to take the risk of a small colour mis-match it would save a bit of money.

Cars that have had poor previous repairs and/or paintwork add to the difficulty and the requirement to blend.