PPG Platinum Distributor | Automotive Refinish | Custom Paint | Aviation Refinish | Industrial Paints | Commercial Paints | Cooper Color, Inc.

As new, more stringent VOC regulations take effect in California and Canada, it is raising concerns with professionals who make their living creating hot paint schemes for custom vehicles, motorcycles, helmets, and other "one-off" creations: How will we be able to create special effects and custom paint jobs and still meet VOC mandates?" Not to worry.

PPG's technology and color teams have developed a compliant solution that ensures all the colors and special effects currently offered with the Vibrance Collection® will be available for use with PPG's premium Envirobase® High Performance waterborne basecoat.

"Our customers in California and Canada love working with our Vibrance Collection custom color line and they're very important to us," says Randy Cremeans, marketing director for PPG Automotive Refinish. "So we challenged our team early on to make sure that the custom painter would not be hindered in the least bit when it becomes necessary to convert to a waterborne system.

Our goal was to take all the custom colors now available in solvent-based systems and offer those same colors in waterborne. And I'm proud to say we're accomplishing our mission.

For the large majority of Vibrance colors, developing a compliant solution was pretty straightforward. PPG's expert color-matchers matched the solvent-based custom colors with Envirobase High Performance waterborne basecoat. The result is a full line-up of "waterborne" formulas available for those who want to create special finishes using Crystal Pearl™, Luminescence II®, Xirallics, Harlequin®, Liquid Metal or StarFire.

New VWM5555 Vibrance Collection Midcoat
Some special effect pigments available in the Vibrance Collection required a new technological solution to achieve waterborne compatibility. PPG developed the answer with its new and innovative Vibrance Collection midcoat. VWM5555 is designed to create a midcoat layer on top of the waterborne basecoat that allows painters to use Vibrance Collection special effect pigments such as Radiance® II dyes, Flamboyance®, Prizmatique®, Liquid Crystals and Ditzler® Big Flake™.

The new VWM5555 midcoat will be available through PPG distributors throughout North America in January, 2009 to create a complete, compliant custom color solution.

For clearcoating, there's a choice of compliant 2.1 clears available for use with Envirobase High Performance waterborne basecoat.