How to Measure Paint Thickness on Vinyl?

Do you know how thick the vinyl was before painting? Is the vinyl an extrusion or a sheet?

More info please.

Yes I know the thickness of the Substate - which varies significantly. Would I need an utrsonic measuring device to measure paint on plastic substrate?

I might be wrong, but, I thought these only worked on metallic substrates.

Here's one. http://www.tqc.eu/en/products/article/360/COATING-THICKNESS-GAUGE-FOR-ALL-SUBSTRATES

But you may have a good point. The paint stores may not have one of these. Most are for metal. Those will measure the thickness of the vinyl also. One of those may work by putting a piece of metal behind the vinyl. Measure thickness of non painted vinyl, followed by measuring thickness of painted vinyl.........the difference would be paint film thickness.

Another option would be to find a piece of scrap metal and use identical method of painting that's being used on vinyl. A regular dry mil gauge will give you an accurate reading.

OK, so I was wrong. Good find.

I get to be right once in a while.

Thank you all for the responses. I believe I know have a lead on some instruments to measure the paint thickness on a plastic substrate.

Can your process be modified to allow WFT measurement in lieu of DFT?

Well most likely the vinyl contains very little titanium to make it opaque, but most paint pigments use titanium dioxide to block visible light. So by applying an Enhanced X-ray Absorbtion Fine Spectrometry (EXAFS) measurement technique for titanium one can make a statistically significant conclusion of the density of titanium along the beam path. By knowing also then the average density of titanium present in a dried flake of the paint you can then back calculate the thickness of the paint present. If this technique is too expensive, esoteric or just plain baffling to you I have other silly ideas. Maybe one will suit you.

You could back calculate by the taking a fixed volume of dried paint and then identify how much this weighs. Weigh the vinyl piece before and after painting. By tracking the loss in mass that happens during curing you should also be able to determine when a truly dried paint condition occurs. Once you determine that you have dried paint, the mass increase along with the known area that has been painted one can then directly determine the average paint thickness to some very high precision.

One could also just simply take a very sharp tool and slide a sliver of paint off of the vinyl at several points on the surface and just measure these thicknesses with a micrometer. Taking an average of these measurements whould minimize random error effects. Another destructive approach that tends to not induce the non random error of compressing the paint is to drill through the paint and vinyl and then measure the thickness by using an optical microscope with a graticuled eyepiece.

Those are my silly ideas. Now lets talk about your budget.

there is also a simple solution to this if you know the thickness of the vinyl before painting a spring loaded dial micrometer may just be what you need i worked with plastics for 15 yrs and this lil tool was indespensible i had supplyers sending me film undergauge by .5mil and the micrometer always proved them wrong i cant rember the manufactuer of it but is spring loaded an is accurate to .5 mil it just clips on to the material and you read the gauge it worked very well too bad i left it behind when i changed jobs id send it to you its a great piece to have

subtract the vinyl thickness from the caliper reading and voila you have the paint thickness providing its evenly spread

also measure the vinyl before and aft in different areas to conform with a uniform coating

average 1.5 mil.

Is that millionths of an inch or millimetres.

Did the space station and the Russian colaboration have a problem with a confusion of terms?

I would guess '1.5 millionths of an inch' would tend towards 'implausible for an effective' coating.

But yeah, I'd email them, mostly as I seem to recall a 'mil' in Imperial is the 1 thou point - or not a millionth at all.

I stand corrected. A factor of 1000 is not too far out!

Well U is English - Imperial is all your fault

I understand it perfectly.

Would having someone perform UT on it solve the problem???

Unidentified Truncation will not be very effective, unless obfuscation transcends. A Uvula Tourniquet seems like a pointless operation but certainly a very tricky.

There are several ways which we measure film build in our paint application processes. Wet Film & Dry Film. To achieve these measurements the following items are used by our QC department. Wet Film Thickness gauge, quick look at what the DFT will be once cured. Operators then control build up at machine. Percent of solids and some calcutaions and you can get pretty darn close just using WFG.

Photo Optical measurements of the Dry Film using micoscope. Self explanitory.

We also use test plates that are laid out onto the substrate and coated, dried and then measured for film build. This gives us the best overall control as operators can do this with a little bit of training.

NIce info guys