It Took a Crane and an Enormous Dumpster to Hydro Dip This Entire Honda Civic
That rattle can paint job just not cutting it anymore? Well, here’s a solution.
When you think of automotive YouTubers, poorly maintained exotic cars and dangerous stunts come to mind. Sure, there are tons of helpful DIY channels, but they don't get nearly as much attention as those who have more money than brains. Thankfully, there are still some people out there producing interesting content—even if it is a bit silly. Take Marko and this Honda Civic that he so handily dipped into a pool of water and spray paint for example.
Hydro dipping, which can sometimes be called water transfer printing, uses paint or film that sits on top of the water and coats the item that's being submerged. There’s usually some prep work involved before the item can be dipped that includes spraying primer and an activator that helps liquefy the ink or graphics that are being applied. The process is pretty common for video game controllers and guns—you know, items that are easily disassembled—but dipping an entire car is on another level.
It’s easy to find a wrap to make your vehicle appear to have been hydro dipped, and another YouTuber made his own wrap for a Lamborghini Huracan, but it looks like this may be the first full-car dip.
Marko’s process was a simplified version of the steps in that "traditional" dip. He used spray paint applied to a small tub of water to coat a hubcap before moving on to the car, but to dip the Honda, the team needed to build a pool. That ended up being a construction dumpster lined with tarps—ugly but efficient—and, most importantly, it worked.
They primed the Civic with white paint before getting started, though the prep was far from perfect. It's probably fine that they skipped a few steps here because submerging an entire car in water—whether it's got paint mixed in or not—is going to cause plenty of other issues.
The finished product looks surprisingly consistent for having been done in a makeshift dumpster-pool lined with tarps. The car doesn’t run, which is no surprise, but the patterns and colors are impressive. This type of thing always looks good on YouTube, but real-life execution tends to be much more complicated and in this case, dipping a whole car is just a bad idea.
Before you go getting any bright ideas about taking your daily driver off the deep end of a neighbor’s pool filled with spray paint, you should probably reconsider. There's a reason that YouTube isn't full of people dunking entire cars, and it's not because of the costs involved. It's because the "right" way to do it is much less exciting and even more labor-intensive. To dip a car without completely killing it, you would have to strip the vehicle down and dip each panel individually. The paint swirls might not match up perfectly, but at least the finished car will be drivable.
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