Coating Truck or SUV Exterior
What Texture and Thickness is Best for External Body Lining?
From the knowledge of spraying lining onto the exterior of jeeps; use on trucks, cars, boats, etc.
Following the trend of applying bed liner to the outside of your vehicle saves you money and shows of the ruggedness of your truck, jeep, even car or boat. Doing these applications your self requires a little bit of experience or careful attention for a few reasons:
- It’s the OUTSIDE of your vehicle!! You don’t want to screw up
- You want to apply the perfect texture for washable yet rough look (anti-stick behavior)
- You want extreme adhesion to metal; higher than the auto paint (through paint/primer)
- Exact Colors require more skill than black or grey
General Rules for Proper Texture and Thickness on External Body Coating using Bed Liner
The things you want to control are total weight of product, durability, texture and color. So, the most general rules (in order to keep this short) are:
- Keep your coating at < 63 mils (<1/16″ of an inch) thick
- For durability you do not want to spray thinner than this unless it’s a purely decorative surface
- For texture you are going to want to work on creating a FINE orange peel, which looks like a bed liner; but perfectly consistent when you inspect closely. The idea is that you want the dirt to be falling off of the vehicle. The more aggressive (higher bumps) the texture, the less washable and the vehicle will be. So, think SMOOTH with MINIMAL BUMPS.
- You can top coat any color color through the coating fully. If you are doing exact color matching, you will be using our Crystal Clear Bed Liner as the top coat. This will bond with the more course underlying light grey bed liner layer #1 to smooth and harden your texture and to keep cost down.
- For tinting all the way through then typically, exact color matching will not work. Those who make claims of perfect match throughout may get close but to be AND REMAIN exact over time would require 100% UV stable auto paint. High quality bed liner is a “Polyurea” which not UV stable. Any marine or auto-grade, tint is a form of “Aliphatic Polyurethane”; that’s not polyurea.
- Top coating with tinted clear requires a minimal amount of tint into a thick (20+ mil) layer. You can custom tint also, any color including metallic. The clear lining is a polyurea hybrid that tints diffuse into. The tint being an aliphatic retains the color, i.e. the term “hybrid”, in this case, tint-able.
- Now your tuff vehicle will retain its tough color tough as possible.
[ See http://spray-lining.com/polyurea-and-bedliner-facts/external-body-bed-liner-question/ for additional information about coating the outside of your truck or SUV]
Can your polyurea bedliner be mixed with different colors?
Yes… the Spray Lining and Coatings products can be custom colored. Feel free to contact the support group at 855-545-4900 to determine color options for your specific need.
How do I know coverage at certain thickness? My ’78 Bronco is about 200 sq ft outside & over 140 sq ft inside. Outside should be light gray, inside a dark tan. You claim soft or hard, any color, any texture. How do you order it to be soft, thinner interior & hard exterior that’s thicker? Thanx
I got Spray-Lining & Coatings’ bedliner on my whole CJ7 Renegade 1976. Your “certified” dealer at Rhino Line-X Alternative did this, inside (light gray) & out (yellow + black) for $3,300 with tax. Now this same stuff is available here for $900 as a DIY in your store as a Jeep exterior bedliner coating – Todd at Corpus Christi Bedliners, who owns the Rhino-Line-X Alternative place said his high pressure system is better than the DIY deal. Why? What are the differences?