The scanner process available today is the best system the repair industry has ever had. I think what you and others that are denigrating it don’t understand is regardless of how you arrive at getting the formula for the color on a car it’s not going to be a 100% match particularly if it a metallic or pearlescent color. The match is determined by the skill of the painter doing the blending when applying the paint. The story John just shared about the red car having various shades of red on it is proof of that.
Quick story
Friend of one of my customers called me to see if I would be interested in painting his 60s era Plymouth, he was upset that it was at another shop an 7-8 months later the only progress was it being disassembled. we talked on several occasions and he finally said the other shop was going to paint his car the following week. He proceeded to tell me that when he went to check on it various parts were hanging in the paint booth ready for the painter, his car was a high metallic wine colored red. To start with I informed the guy that I had been painting cars for 40 years and if this individual could paint his car in pieces and it matched when it was reassembled he knew something I didn’t know. He got all concerned and actually accused me of bad mouthing the other shop. No I’m not bad mouthing the other shop I’m just telling you he knows something I don’t know because I would not paint any high metallic or with today’s pearlescent colors disassembled. Well they called him to tell him it was finished and he could pick it up at his convenience. He said he had never been so sick to his stomach as when he first seen his car. He said every panel where it adjoined the adjacent panel was a different color and stood out like a sore thumb. There are too many factors that affect the final shade once the car dries especially your glamour colors.
He said he made them paint his car again the second time while it was assembled.
You can put state of the art equipment in industry in tech’s hands and you’ll have adopters and nat-sayers regardless of how good the equipment is.
I remember when the HVLP paint guns first hit the industry, most older painters hated them. too much orange peel, didn’t atomize the paint good enough you go in their shop 6-8 months later HVLP were thrown over in the corner and they would be using their trusty binks or devillbess conventional type guns.They didn’t have the volume of air available for the low pressure they operated at. They would buy a 2-300 dollar gun and stop there they would refuse to run larger feed lines and some even have 1/4 ID hoses they were using. When you have a skilled labor job that has older techs that learned their trade secrets the old fashoned way of trail and error old habits are hard to break.
You should try convincing some older painter that that 50’ hose he was using that when he set the pressure at x pounds at the regulater that he didn’t have the same X pounds 50’ later where it coupled at the gun, and I would dare say you could go into 15-20 shops in a large city and you would be hard pressed to find 10% of those shops that actually had an air cap that fit their paint gun with a pressure gage on it so they could measure the air pressure at the gun. Most would hook the hose to the gun pull the trigger wide open and adjust the pressure that way. And that gets you in the ballpark not very accurate which kinda sorta sufficed 20-30 years ago. And that’s in a large demographic and going to be worse in your rural areas.
Next time any of you go in a body shop do a quick assessment of the average age of the techs in the shop. Young people don’t want to do this kink of work and most older tech are just buying time and aren’t interested in adapting to todays technology if they can get by without doing so.
I found the original post by Noel Annette, wonder where he went? Anyway it wasn’t a scanner but the story does point up the fact that paint can look the same but be different shades. Who recalls all the details of a 23 year old post?
John that story is the biggest reason shops try their damnest to have the vehicle sitting outside in natural light when the customer comes to pickup their car and sees it for the first time. If their are any flaws in the paint job the lights in a shop will magnify them.
Next time you see a 3 stage paint job good example being the pearl whites on so many cars today walk around the vehicle and look at the paint at different angles and you’ll see different shades depending on how the sunlight hits it.
One more quick point, at one point in time a top of the line paint job was determined by how much talent and experience the person applying the paint had. Thant’s not rule of thumb with todays cars. Like everything else in skilled labor you have to keep up with the quickly changing technology, and unfortunately that gets expensive real guick.
Sorry bout hijacking the thread good luck with your quest.
Once again I shared what I feel is the correct mix formula on June 29 by doing it the old fashioned way with 40+ experience of painting and restoring classic cars. Any mixer who sells BASF can exactly match using the supplied formula. The electronic eye does well on new colors because it has a database built for those variations but not so much on single stage metallic lacquer colors from the past. My mixer used the electronic eye and it was close but no cigar! This paint formula was matched by my eye against an original paint 1964 chassis 1E10154 opalescent maroon interior part that was not exposed to dirt or sunlight (which darkens red over time) painted part. I have roughly 20 hours and 30 spray out panels before I was OK with the color match and flake grain size. My color was not enhanced in any way to get the most “favorable color” but to match as close as humanly possible to the original color. This chassis also has a maroon interior which is very rare! This car will be restored back to concour condition.
Coolcatz, are you saying maroon on maroon is rare or just the maroon interior (or both)? I ask because my 63 FHC was supposedly a special order pearl grey exterior with maroon interior (per JHT) and I’ve noticed that most of the usuals do not offer maroon interior kits. I was starting to believe that maybe a dark red was being pedaled as the same as maroon… or maybe its rare enough that most don’t figure the kits would sell?
Most of the “usual’s” do not offer a kit because it was a very unusual color and rarely offered with most vintage supplies not restocked. I carefully removed the interior from my car which was original paint and original interior and matched it up as close as possible with currently offered materials. Leather color was easy, carpet and moquette was not but after requesting samples from unusual sources I found some very close materials. If you respond to my email [tomz@catzauto.com](mail to: tomz@catzauto.com) I can show you some photos.
