Just ordered my Highline II!

hust out of curiosity....the more microns the better no? so that 450 means you have a lot of room to compound before hitting the paint right? noob question

 

from what i know (i could be wrong) in this case the 450 he has is most likely the paint and maybe some clear coat. normal factory paint and clear is about 100 and something at least on my car it is. When you measure with these things it takes a measurement of all layers base coat and clear coat together. so it could be 449 microns of paint and 1 of clear or the other way around. of course with those numbers your paint would look at one of those weird paintings in museums :crasy: So basically when you identify a resprayed area you should proceed with a lot of caution or skip it if you arent sure.

 

If the car has been repainted, then chances are there's more clear, but it's not quite as straight forward as that.
It'll depend a lot on the painter, as there could be a hefty layer of paint, with a less hefty amount of clearcoat.
So caution is always the better part of valour, even in instances like these.

 

Typical Clearcoat systems have about 3.5 to 5.5 Mils (87 - 137 Micros) TOTAL film, with clear coats about 1.5 to 2.0 Mils thick. You cannot remove more than .3 to .5 mils, or else you risk UV Damage & Clearcoat failure. Some say you can't remove more than 10% of the top clearcoat, other people I have heard said not over 25%. That being said, its pretty much a given that everyone knows clearcoats are EXTREMELY thin. (My info is a bit unspecific so anyone may correct me on this)

If you're reading 450 micros it's because there is bondo on the panel from a repaint. Do note the ultrasonic and high end models measure strictly clearcoat/paintcoat film builds.