Reproducing "Lizard Skin" wrinkle paint on steering shroud

Thicker coats will definitely give you larger wrinkles, so perhaps the coat thicknesses were not the same in both cases.

For all the brands I mentioned, I did a pretty careful heat-vs-no-heat test, and heating always gave smaller wrinkles; dramatically smaller, if one used and IR lamp...

 

I found that heating the part itself before painting did not cause much of a noticeable difference in outcome. If I had to draw some conclusion, I would say that heating the part might have made the wrinkles slightly larger.

Mind you, I am using pretty heavy coats of paint; with thinner coats, I could imagine heating the part will change things more. Of course if the coats are really thin, you won't get much wrinkling at all anyway.

Tidbit: Plastikote is easily the brand that will wrinkle at the thinnest coats.

 

Yes; no "VIN boss", so Euro...

As you'd expect, I've seen both Euro and USA cars with that same "lizard skin" wrinkle finish...

 

Well, my power-coat guy is not aware of a source for such a powder-coat.

There is a "crocodile" powder coat that at first glance looks sort of similar, but if you look closely it is not the same...

 

Just realized that I never posted a conclusion to this thread.

Here are the highlights:
1) Don't believe anything you find on the internet. Some of the tricks that people cite might have worked in the distant past, but paint formulations have changed, and modern paints don't react the way they used to.
2) If you really feel like experimenting, interpret "lacquer" as nitrocellulose lacquer (which one can still get in spray cans for guitar finishing), and "enamel" as Rustoleum Professional High-Performance Enamel; with these two types of products most of the internet "advice" seems to not be totally false, but the none of the wrinkle patterns that I was ever able to get were anywhere close to the desired finish; generally speaking, all the wrinkles were much too fine and uniform, no matter how much I changed mixing ratios and drying times.
3) The product that worked the "best" was ironically the one that was most prone to an uneven wrinkle finish: "Pit Crew" by Seymour. Since the wrinkling of this product is sensitive to the surface it is applied to, one can literally paint the desired wrinkle pattern on the piece and then spray the Pit Crew over it. The wrinkling texture varies according to the underlying pattern and you can get something passable.

Some things to note on the Pit Crew:
a) The uneven finishing of the basic metal piece will tend to overshadow anything that you do with pre-painting, so you have to start by priming the piece enough to fill all the finish irregularities.
b) The finish of the paint has a sort of "glossy plastic" look that is not quite right. I managed to find a NOS sample of the original wrinkle finish, and it is actually surprisingly glossy, but does not have that same "plastic" quality.
c) No matter how hard you try to avoid it, if you want coarse wrinkling, the Pit Crew is going to give you some areas where the wrinkles literally become "fins" on the surface; the pattern is tight, but the wrinkles themselves are just too high. I took an Xacto-knife and manually just cut down any fins that looked unacceptable.

Here are some pictures of what I finally did, and ended-up with; not perfect, but a lot better than just using VHT or something...
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