Waterborne Lacquer over Paint

Here are a handful of reasons to avoid applying clear waterborne lacquers as a topcoat over pigmented acrylic paint. June 7, 2011

Question
I have been finishing with Chemcraft WB now for several years. I have also opened a paint store and I carry all Pratt and Lambert products. I am spraying furniture etc for customers now at the store and I much prefer spraying lacquer to using latex or acryllic.

My problem is that I do not have the capacity to do color matches in the lacquer line at my store and the time/shipping costs really take the fun out of the use of lacquer. What kind of success/failures have you experienced in laying a cost of WB lacquer down over a Paint base?

Forum Responses
(Finishing Forum)
From contributor M:
I used to do this for the reasons you have, now I only use lacquer. I had success with this as long as you put a light seal coat on first, real light, then slowly build from there, If not you will get crackling. For some reason different colors are worse than others. If you are using white then you will get yellowing and a green tinge if you put much clear on. If you happen to be doing black the water base clear will make it look blue in the light even after it’s dry. One other issue I had was with latex it was real easy to get a fingerprint in it because it stays tacky for so long then clear over it, and find it later.