I'm trying to decide between single and two stage urethane. It seems like one important consideration is which one is easier to correct when the time comes to refinish. Say you find out the SS paint you bought just didn't stand up to the elements like you were hoping it would. Or you did like many, and didn't get the clear coat on correctly, or used a poor quality clear, or whatever. Assuming the primer is 2 or 3 coats of good quality epoxy over clean metal:

If a clear starts to peel, what then. Do you remove the clear coats from just the panel that's peeling and reshoot a matched-color base coat there followed by more clear coats. You get one panel refinished and it's likely there will be another panel to do next year, seems to me.

If a single stage fades out, pits easily or whatever because it's inferior paint, and you didn't put any clear over it because you didn't want to deal with peeling, what then? Would you take it all off down to the good epoxy primer, re-shoot it with a higher quality or just scuff it good and shoot a better quality single or two stage over that?
Thanks

i think your worrying to much about what ifs. base coat with clear coat is your best option, its easy to work with and easy to repair. say if you damage a panel you can spot and blend the repair on that one panel SOMETIMES depending on where and how much the damage is. trying to just remove one layer of paint ( just the clear coat) doesn't work very well. if the finish is that bad its better to go all the way to bare metal and start over. you can try and sand down to the epoxy, but in doing so with say a D/A sander your going to have a very uneven surface. this will require blocking and or primer to get it level.
Jay D.

Bustedwrench wrote:I'm trying to decide between single and two stage urethane.......

The criteria I use is whether the paint color is a poly/metallic or pearl, or not.
BC/CC works better for metallic and pearls, and a single stage can be considered
for a non-poly color.

There are several reasons for this, but the major ones are a better distribution
of the metallic in using basecoat, and you can repair any errors before clearing.

With a single stage paint, what you spray is what you get, if it's a poly.

Sounds good guys, thank you much for expert advice. I’m going with the Omni single stage I have and will shoot for a better quality SS next time, although as Dave says the criticism for Omni might just be from inept application