Sorry if I missed this but how do you know if your paint is hard or soft?
If you have the book and have read it then you missed it.
My how-to book really covers just about everything. On the topic of hard or soft paint in the
Second Edition in the paperback book it's on page 7 and 8.
And what it says is there's no way to create a definitive "list" of every car ever made and whether the "factory" paint on that car is hard, soft or somewhere in-between.
That would take a thousand pages to start with and as I explain in the book... car manufacturers are continually changing the paint systems they use. So any type of list created would quickly become obsolete. Think about it... "stuff" changes. In fact stuff is changing faster now than ever before. The iPhone 5s was just introduced and now they're introducing a new iPhone this spring.
Paint changes too. Paint manufactures are continually improving paint coatings for the OEM. Nothing stays the same.
So here's what I wrote in my book. The honest and practical truth. That is the only way and the best way to know if the specific paint system on ANY car is hard or soft is to,
Buff out a lot of cars and lock into your brain how the paint reacted when you compounded or polished it. This gives you experience so each time you work on a new car you'll be able to gauge if the paint is hard or soft as compared to the car you've buffed out in the past.
This is how I can tell if the paint on a car is hard or soft.
Experience.
This is how any pro I know can tell if a paint system is hard or soft.
The problem is that the majority of people in this world reading a forum like this or a book like mine don't buff out LOTS of cars but are only interested in buffing out the car in their garage.
I understand this. But the honest truth is in order to really know if a paint system is hard or soft or somewhere in-between the person doing the buffing needs some experience.
The next best things a person can do include,
Doing a Test Spot
And then sharing the results you see on a forum like this. You'll get lots of feedback from people that do have experience. (Doing a test spot is also in the book)
You'll also get feedback from people that either own the same car as you or have worked on the same car, (make/mode/year/paint color), and they can share what they found out.
This really only applies when you're working on FACTORY paint because anytime you're working on a re-paint there's no comparison to gauge against.
This question comes up all the time, is the paint on my car hard or soft, heck I have a really good article on this on MOL that I wrote years ago and it explains the issues and problems with having a simple way to know about paint hardness or softness.
Paint Workability - The Hardness or Softness of your car's paint
And here's my quote from the above article and it's just as true today as it was when I wrote it...
"You don't how hard or soft your paint is until you go out into your garage and work on your car"
So to answer your questions....
"Yes" you missed the section in the book.
And is the paint on your BMW hard or soft? Most of the discussions I've read about "most" BMW paint is that it's somewhere in the middle but leaning towards the softer side. It's not super hard like a modern Corvette but not stupid soft like a lot of factory black Porsche paint jobs.
Experience and a helpful forum are your friends...
Hope that helps...
