Choosing a paint coating thickness gauge for checking a car body

Many body repair shops have learned to do work at the level of dealer repair. If you are not engaged in the selection and inspection of cars, then a qualitatively repaired car visually, no matter how you look at the details, cannot be distinguished from the whole.

In every district of the city, car dealerships have opened, which deal exclusively with used cars: buying, selling, trade-in, including all pre-sale preparation. They will polish the repaired cars in such a way that the layman cannot determine the traces of what happened.

Everyone who chose a car in the secondary market heard phrases from sellers: not a bit, not painted, everything is in factory paint. The seller's task is to sell the car as profitable as possible, to find a gullible buyer. Your task is to dismiss such options, because they may show operational problems.

Here thickness gauges come to the rescue in the inspection of a car. Perhaps this is one of the easiest ways to determine on the spot whether it is necessary to further inspect the car. The choice of thickness gauges is large. We will be interested in the electromagnetic principle of measuring the thickness of the paintwork:

How to choose a device without unnecessary functions, so as not to overpay, but to measure accurately enough? First, let's decide what thickness of paintwork we will measure. There are tables of standard paint thicknesses on conveyor models from different car manufacturers:

As you can see, the thickness of the body painting is different for different models of even one manufacturer. But on average, these values ​​are from 80 microns to 160 microns. There are exceptions: as with double painting in production or the thickness of the paint can be large in hand-assembled cars.

For error-free measurements, we need the thickness gauge to display values ​​on the board 100 microns with an error of readings in 10 microns. Many inexpensive thickness gauges show an indication in the form 0.1 mm and error 0.1 mm (after 1 does not display values). These are too rough measurements for inspection of car paintwork.

The maximum paint thickness measurement for most inexpensive thickness gauges is 2 mm (more than tenfold excess of the factory paint thickness).

The readings with the scale division should be as follows for the thickness gauge:

Those. the value must be displayed either signed 0.10 mm, or in the format 100 microns.

The first slide shows that the thickness of the paint, and probably with putty, is 4 times exceeded. Those. this item has been renovated.

Here is a video with information that the readings of an inexpensive thickness gauge in millimeters are not enough. And the author switched it to the measurement mode in millinches: https://youtu.be/f0pTQtRdgNA

By the way, you can return the funds (or part of the funds) spent on the purchase of the thickness gauge by renting it out for a certain period with a deposit. Or you can drive up and measure the paintwork for such people. But due to the fact that thickness gages are now available, there is no longer a massive demand for such a service.

There is no point in purchasing expensive models (if you do not work in trade-in). The most accurate ones are eddy current. Their cost is from 8000 rubles. Conventional electromagnetic thickness gauges will do. It happens that they provide for calibration. Not very convenient, it is better to choose with self-calibration. Low-cost models include: Yunombo YNB-100 (measurement resolution 0.05 mm). Of the more expensive ones - Horstek TC 715 (with self-calibration).

How to measure with a thickness gauge? Just walk around the car and measure. There may be deviations. For example, the paint thickness on the front pillars may be higher than on the doors. Identical elements to the left and right of the vehicle must have equal values. The thickness gauge does not measure on the bumper, because it is plastic.

A good story about thickness gauges here: https://www.drive2.ru/b/498158208171377003

An example where you can see that there are colored elements. 1 on the device is more than 1 mm thick.

There are exceptions when you cannot determine whether repairs have been carried out. Many high-quality car services repair cars with paint to the factory thickness. For example, with a complete replacement of body parts and assemblies. You can determine what is wrong in the car either in places where fresh paint covers a narrow plane of the old one. After polishing, such bodies cannot be distinguished by their gloss and shade. But you still need to get into such an overlap with a thickness gauge.

Sometimes body parts of expensive foreign cars are covered with an armored film after repair. The thickness of the film together with the paint will be 2-3 times higher than the factory coating:

It happens that, according to the readings of the thickness gauge, there are suspicions (but not obvious) and this may indicate a high-quality repair. In this case, you will have to check every little thing with your eyes: look into the places where the doors are fastened to the body, look under the sealing gum. Look for colored specks stuck to the body. It is very rarely possible to bring everything to an ideal state.

Thickness gauge prices:

Thickness gauges can still be viewed here. Many models are sold on aliexpress as well.

The easiest way to check a car for participation in an accident is to check it by the VIN number on the traffic police website or on sites with ads. All incidents are recorded in the databases. On these sites, you can also purchase a complete report on the legal cleanliness of the car.

And the last tip - always take a real receipt (prepared in advance) from the seller for receiving money (with a copy of your passport). The agreement is not a panacea for intermediaries. There was a story in my life when I did not take such a document from an intermediary, and later filed a wanted list for the car. This was during the wild car market and the shortage of comfortable cars.

Write in the comments to whom the thickness gauge helped in choosing a car and which model you used.

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