I was just reading an article in Hot Rod [August 2003 (page 37)] about a 427 Biscayne that was painted with what they quote as a "now-outlawed nitrocellulose base".

The claim is that the car possesses the deepest, blackest, black paint imaginable, and it is a function of the nitrocellulose.

I've never heard of this. Was this a common thing in older paints? And, what about it gives it this paint depth?

Crankshaft

The original lacquer paint. Like in "Hand rubbed lacquer" from the day.

Yep, the nitrocellulose is the OLD stuff. If was used until the late 50s/early 60s. It's newer brother is acrylic lacquer.

Me thinks they may have been exaggerating the "blackest black" claim. My recollection is that the base of black nitrocellulose lacquer was carbon black which under some lighting conditions actually has a brownish tint especially when compared to the "blue" blacks.

I thought that was guitar paint.
Learn something every day.

Old grand pianos and furniture used it as a finish. This is also same paint I believe that Henery Ford used on his first cars.

Yep, furniture, guitars and old cars.

Dang!, now I can't get that song outta my head...

"Guitars, Cadillacs (& Hillbilly Women)"

That's odd...I was just at Home Depot not more than an hour ago, getting some polyurethane to finish a wood floor...right beside that was a big can of nitrocellulose laquer finish. Maybe it's only outlawed in Cali?

PS - My old HS science teacher had a story about exploding balls on a pool table. He says because they used to use NC laquer for them after ivory was outlawed. That is nitrocellulose as in "gun cotton" AKA smokeless gun powder. He said every once in a while, the NC would start to decompose or have traces of nitroglycerine residue...some guy would make what he thought was the winning shot and **BOOM** Wonder if the same goes for a car painted with NC?

http://physchem.ox.ac.uk/MSDS/NI/nitrocellulose.html

Think they quit using it on cars in the late fifties. I had a car once that was painted with this stuff. You can polish it to a great sheen, but you also have to stay on it, polish and wax quite often or it will go dull. If you want to use it, better give it a good, heavy coat, or else you'll polish through it sooner or later.

I used to be a color matcher at a place that made all them different color chips and that's what we used,tried it on a car once but it had no UV protection!!

I read the same article and if you read the side bar with all the specs and details it says it was painted with Glasurit single stage paint 5 years ago.I could be wrong but I am 99% positive that glasurit lacquer has never been available in north america.I would say that the paint is urethane single stage and the guy who wrote the the article didn't know what he was talking about graemlins/clonk.gif

And all this time I thought Hendrix's secret was a can of Ronson and a Zippo... :D