The owner of this Subaru Impreza painted the whole car himself, with a roller, using PANCERX ARMOR in black and RAL 7016. He took the "before" photo two years earlier, specifically so he would have something to compare it with.
Message from the customer
In full, exactly as he sent it to us.
Hi, I changed the look of my car with PANCERX. I took the first photos two years ago so I would have the look before the changes for comparison. Then repairs and touch-ups last summer. I was planning to wrap this car but after the first attempts I decided I wanted to do something else. This year I went with PANCERX in black and RAL 7016. It came out great, I laid the first two coats with a foam roller which was a bit of a mistake because it left streaks. A flocked roller is definitely better for painting a car and the last two coats were already done with that kind of roller. I stripped the car down to parts and over about two weeks, in the evenings, I took my time and got every detail right. I know people send you cars done with PANCERX so I decided to do it too. If you want to record a reel with the car or a video, get in touch.
What to take from this
The most valuable sentence in the whole message is the one about the roller. The foam one left streaks, so the last two coats went on with a flocked roller and those are the ones that evened out the surface. If you are buying one roller for a car, buy the flocked one. Foam soaks up the material and leaves a mark where its edge runs.
That isn't unique to car paint. A foam roller pushes air into the wet film as you roll, more so the thicker or more viscous the material gets. Plain water-based wall paint suffers the same problem: foam is a documented cause of bubbling there too. A thick 2K coating like ARMOR sits at the rough end of that scale. The usual fix is a shorter, denser pile instead of open-cell foam. Rollers built that way turn up in supplier guides as the recommendation for high-build materials like epoxies, under a few different names: shed-resistant, lint-free, woven, occasionally mohair for metallic finishes. A flocked roller, the short dense pile glued straight to the sleeve instead of open-cell foam, belongs to that same family. None of them are flawless. A cheap one still sheds the odd fibre into a wet coat. For a 3:1 mixed batch of ARMOR, the tradeoff favours short-pile over foam regardless. Anyone about to try this themselves should read our full step-by-step roller painting guide first.
The second thing is the strip-down. With the handles, lights and trims off, there is no tape edge showing anywhere and no colour cut short inside a panel gap. It took him about two weeks, but in the evenings, after work, without taking the car off the road for a month.
The start is interesting too. The car was meant to be wrapped, and the first attempts with vinyl changed the plan. Four coats of ARMOR came out cheaper, and the coating holds on the metal differently than vinyl does, because it becomes part of the surface instead of a layer stuck onto the paint.
RAL 7016 has an official name: Anthracite Grey in the RAL Classic system, Anthrazitgrau in the original German catalogue. RAL gGmbH, the German body that maintains RAL Classic, assigns and fixes that code across the whole catalogue. It's rated among the darkest greys in that range, closer to black than to a lighter charcoal. It has a cool undertone. Window frames are where this shade shows up most in architecture: aluminium and PVC frame makers have offered it as a standard option for years, and it reads as a grey that goes with almost any facade colour behind it. Garden fences get painted in it too. It has a life in car paint as well: sold as a ready 2K matte finish and, separately, as a drop-in pigment made specifically for liquid wrap and bedliner work, mixed in the same way you'd mix pigment into ARMOR COLOR, the pigmentable version of the coating. The same RAL code turns up in a window frame manufacturer's catalogue and in a wrap shop's pigment list. This Impreza itself was headed for a wrap before the owner switched to ARMOR.
Want your own colour? RAL 7016 and the whole palette are in ARMOR COLOR, and black, ready to use, is ARMOR BLACK. And we are getting in touch with the Impreza owner about the video.
