My buddy Ron had this happen with a ductile iron casting at a shop in Akron. He preheated what he thought was a dry core, but there was trapped moisture deep inside. The whole core blew apart as steam built up, cracked the mold face clean in two, and sent green sand across three work stations. Took him the rest of the shift to get everything sorted and the foreman made him buy lunch for the crew for a week.

@daniel391, two hours can feel like a lifetime with the wrong book! But yeah, this approach actually changed my mind. I used to be on nora_webb51's side, thinking breaking down a passage would kill the mood. But bringing a specific page to show the emptiness? That makes SO much sense. It turns the talk from a vague complaint into something you can actually grab onto and argue about. Now I'm kicking myself for all the meetings we wasted just saying "it felt flat" without having anything concrete to back it up.

Wait, TEN YEARS? That's INSANE. I can't believe nobody caught that on a single inspection or anything before the wife finally said something.

Right but isn't the bigger problem that it was even able to do that in the first place? Like what happens when someone doesn't catch it in time because they're busy or tired.

Has he tried looking into brands like HOK or PPG that still make single-stage urethane that's close enough to the old lacquer look? @sagejackson is right about VOC laws being the real headache, but you can get a modern basecoat/clearcoat system that mimics the depth and gloss without the headache of finding original lacquer. I've had luck going to a shop that specialises in classic cars, having them scan the Polaroid with a spectrophotometer (yeah, it works on photos sometimes) and mixing a modern version based on the original code. Just warn him that the new paint might look slightly different under certain light because the old lacquer had a unique way of laying down that's hard to recreate.