Many stripes on vehicles today are decals. They are applied after the car is painted and made out of a vinyl material that is really a pain in the neck to work with unless you have had some practice.
On older vehicles these stripes are painted on with a flat paint and normally they are not protected with a clear coat but this is not to say you can’t use clear over flat paint.
Obviously if you used standard clear coat paint over flat paint it would look glossy and this is not what you want.
So how …
Most paint today is base coat color without any protection which is covered by a clear coat but what if you are restoring a vehicle that was originally painted with a single stage enamel?
Chemical Stripper can be your best friend or a total nightmare depending on how you use it. The benefit of chemical stripper is that it can take off large amounts of paint relatively cheaply. The one thing that you don’t want to do is think of chemical stripper the same way you would media blasting.
With the move to Waterborne technology many manufacturers are touting faster production times due to many factors. If you read their literature or watch their training videos it seems that you could almost paint a whole vehicle in 20% of the time it takes to paint with solvent based paints but are Waterborne Paints really increasing production by that much?