Making Paint is like Baking Cake

Painting a yacht is really like baking a cake. In order to get the best tasting cake, you must follow the correct instructions and use high quality ingredients. Of course, there are a few more demands to a perfect yacht finish than to baking a cake, but it’s the same philosophy for the perfect result. To meet these requirements, most of our coatings are multi component products. Whereas in yacht coating contexts, converter and reducer is added, which causes a chemical reaction next to the physical reaction. This creates a super strong cross linking which serves to resist external influences. Those paint layers can only be removed mechanically, as this process is irreversible … just like a baked cake.

Like the ingredients for the cake, the coating components are mixed by volume, e.g. with a volume measuring stick. Our ALEXSEAL Yacht Coatings team pays particular attention to keeping the mixing ratios as simple as possible accurate mixing and stirring is the foundation for receiving best possible gloss, perfect hiding power and outstanding DOI.

That brings us right back to making a cake: if the flour is still crumbly and not stirred in properly, or if there is not enough baking powder, the end result will be lumpy and falling apart. Luckily there are ALEXSEAL technical data sheets offering perfect guidance ... like the baking recipe.

In a cake, the egg ensures that all the other ingredients are held together in the best possible way and that the dough is consistent and easy to handle. It may be tricky to make a cake without an egg, but it is impossible to make good paint without a binder even when other components can be dispensed. Clear coatings, for example, contain neither pigments nor fillers but must have binders.

We add some cocoa to our cake mix. In the case of paint, this is equivalent to colored pigments. They are an insoluble component of the paint’s film with a very important task: they impart a color or a special effect to the coating. Other pigments, so called effect pigments, can provide optical or haptic highlights like a metal appearance to the film of the coating.

The unique secret ingredients (e.g. lemon zest, dash of rum, blob of butter) give the final final touch to the cake. It's no different with coatings. For that specific something, we have additives. They are costly ingredients and are only added to the paint in secret small amounts, but they have a significant effect. They improve the properties of the paint before, during, and after its processing.