Step-by-Step: Masking Body Swage Lines & Edges with JTAPE Blending Tape

Swage lines and edges add dimension to the body panels of a car. But their defined edges can often be tricky to replicate when repainting or refinishing the bodywork of a vehicle. These areas will most often need to be sanded, filled, and painted when there are visible dents, chips or scratches in the bodywork or paint layers. Ensuring you can fix these to a high standard is something that your customers are likely to appreciate.

In this guide, we’ll be offering the best tips and tricks to assist you with these body line jobs and ensure each line is sharp, clean and always meets the standards for your repair shop and your clients.

Best Tapes for Masking Swage Lines & Edges

Specialist painting jobs like this require specialist, professional quality solutions. Below we’ll offer our top product suggestions to help you achieve the best possible finish on your paint job.

Flexi No Edge Blending Tape

At JTAPE we’ve designed our Flexi No Edge Blending Tape to ensure there is no line and the paint seamlessly blends old paintwork into new, all while leaving you with a professional finish the customer will be happy with. Whether you’re working on curves or straight edges, this tape can conform to whatever type of edge you need.

How to Mask Swage Lines for Painting

Using our Flexi No Edge Blending Tape can drastically simplify the process of masking swage lines for painting. Taping against swage lines can sometimes be a tedious process, but our tape gives one solution for all types of bodywork lines – both straight and curved.

Below, we’ll guide you through the best practices to follow when masking these areas of a vehicle.

Prepare the surface

Start off by sanding down the area you’ll be painting. For example, if you’re repairing a scratch or dent below the swage line, you’ll want to sand this section down and carry out your repair before beginning the masking and painting stages.

Apply your Flexi No Edge Blending Tape

Getting the placement of your tape just right can be a time-consuming process. To help with this, the flexible foam of this tape makes it even easier and quicker to mask around corners with precision. This eliminates any rework, saving time and materials.

Our Flexi No Edge Blending Tape will adhere directly to bodywork effectively, and you don’t necessarily need to attach it using masking tape, so long as you use the right amount of pressure and avoid stretching it.

Paint the swage lines

The final step is to paint the swage lines and edges. Remember that it can often take a few coats of paint to ensure you achieve an evenly covered finish.

You should remove the tape while the paint is still tacky for the perfect finish. This should be a simple process thanks to the feathered edge created by our tape solution. At this stage, try not to buff over the edge of your line because this can dull the edge in certain places and reduce the quality of your work.

After you’ve buffed everything and you’re happy, you can then spray your final coats of base paint and finish off with a clear coat to blend everything together.

How to Mask Wheel Arches for Painting

When masking wheel arches, you’ll need to follow a very similar process to the one used for body lines. From properly preparing the area to marking out where you want the tape to sit depending on where you’re going to be painting, many of the same steps will apply.

The main difference here is that the wheel arch is exactly what it says on the tin – an arch. However, you can simply take one continuous strip of the JTAPE Flexi No Edge Blending Tape and carefully form it around the curve of the wheel arch, making it an incredibly easy process despite the tricky angle.

Again, be sure to press the tape down as you go once you’re happy with the placement since this will help you achieve the best adhesion to the surface and complete your repair job to the highest standard. Once your tape is placed, you can paint as you would for the swage lines, making sure to remove the tape while it’s still slightly tacky.

We hope this guide allows you to brush up on your skills and start masking off clean swage lines or edges for professional-standard results every time. Discover more of our excellent JTAPE products available on our website.