I bought an insurance salvage yellow Sentra that needed some suspension repair and a fender. I took a used fender, along with the old one for a match, to my bodyshop to have it painted. Bolted it on the car, and its way more orange than the rest of the car...untill you get it out in the sun, and then its way more yellow than the rest of the car...
I'd hang myself if I had to deal with that every day.
Yea, and a lot of the newer colors are really hard to match.
even worse, I want some rust fixed on my van before it becomes a hole, but there are 4 colors of stripes pained over that area. The paint is also sun-faded 20 years.
spitfirebill wrote: Yea, and a lot of the newer colors are really hard to match.
And that's even before we start discussing metallics...
The painters who can match paint perfectly have a real talent, it's tough to do.
My mom's old MKIII supra has the pearl white paint and I remember hearing somewhere they used to use like abalone or something to make the pearl, which makes it impossible to match. Is that correct or am I just pulling that out of my butt?
Ford used to send out engineers to places repairing and painting Mystic Cobras, just to get a consistent paint match.
My moms ex-husband was an insurance adjuster and he said the (old man style) white pearl was the hardest paint to match. I have to say I've never seen the camry beige metallic correctly matched, always a different color.
Great painters make Great Big Money.
Gasoline wrote: Great painters make Great Big Money.
...And they die with great big livers and tiny, black shriveled lungs.
I use to color match by eye at SW and Lowes, and the hardest part about matching is that everything around it is old and you are adding a new piece of paint to a area. Although the painters always blamed me, I believed that their techniques were not up to par, and it takes some finesse to do a good job.
I love painting cars, but would hate to do it for a living.
I have a painter friend. I jokingly asked him about paintmatching my Audi S6. He laughed.
(It's pearl white...)
We had a pearl white Audi convertible in the late 90s that was hit hard. It needed a door, fender, quarter and hood. We could not get it to look right. We tried three different paints, and they all looked odd. We finally sanded down the whole car and painted it. It looked great, the pearl was nice and even. The owner picked it up and was happy, and wanted to know how we got all the splotches out of the paint.
Ranger50 wrote: Ford used to send out engineers to places repairing and painting Mystic Cobras, just to get a consistent paint match.
IS that really true? I have a very anal friend who used to have a Mystic. This is a guy who restored a 100 point concourse winning car at home, supper fussy. He had to do some touch up on this Mystic Cobra and was dreading it, but he said it was the easiest touch up he'd ever done. Admittedly this was just stone chips, not re-painting, but he said it was invisible afterwards.
One problem being, of course, is that you're not matching that nice Guards Red paint job on the Porsche, but Guards Red that's been out and about for 10+ years. Matching a faded, weathered paint job takes talent.
The problem with color matching white pearls is that the insurance companies never pay enough to get it matched correctly. It takes many, many test panels to know how many coats of the base white to apply, how many coats of the pearl mid coat and the number of clear coats to get it to match. Blending out to the next panel was almost never enough. It's a very long process. Nissan had a cream color pearl that was always a nightmare to match. I always lost money on those jobs. Usually if I had to fix a door I just did the whole side of the car and kept the new color all the top fo the fender and 1/4 panel.
When my car was wrecked the body guy said it would be easier to paint the whole car versus just the front clip. It's metallic silver.
Rufledt wrote: My mom's old MKIII supra has the pearl white paint and I remember hearing somewhere they used to use like abalone or something to make the pearl, which makes it impossible to match. Is that correct or am I just pulling that out of my butt?
Correct.
Panel repaints always show, you are supposed to blend into the next panel to minimize the different age paint showing as different colors. Even with an exact color code match, one has to take in weathering and other paint fading factors.
Adrian_Thompson wrote:Ranger50 wrote: Ford used to send out engineers to places repairing and painting Mystic Cobras, just to get a consistent paint match.IS that really true? I have a very anal friend who used to have a Mystic. This is a guy who restored a 100 point concourse winning car at home, supper fussy. He had to do some touch up on this Mystic Cobra and was dreading it, but he said it was the easiest touch up he'd ever done. Admittedly this was just stone chips, not re-painting, but he said it was invisible afterwards.
Wasn't about the paint match. . .
At the time Ford considered Mystic to be a Super Top Secret formulation. My brother was doing collision work at a shop when they first came out with Mystic and a Mystic Stang came in. He did the repair and prep then the shop owner made a call for the appointment. There was a wait until finally the Ford sprayers came in, mixed the formulation on the site, sprayed the car, left and took the leftovers with them. Also "Mystic" at time of production was not a Dupont paint. Dupont only owned the formula (i.e., the correct mix). Since then BASF has come out with a premix.
Racedreamer wrote: Nissan had a cream color pearl that was always a nightmare to match. I always lost money on those jobs. Usually if I had to fix a door I just did the whole side of the car and kept the new color all the top fo the fender and 1/4 panel.
Friend had one of those. He took a spike into the hood and sent it in for a repair. Fascinating watching the shop ever expand the job trying to get it to match. Hood, hood & fenders, hood fender & front doors, etc. It came back to him in various shades of yellow, orange, blue, tan, etc.
Somewhere around the 6th time they finally completely repainted the car.
Rufledt wrote: My mom's old MKIII supra has the pearl white paint and I remember hearing somewhere they used to use like abalone or something to make the pearl, which makes it impossible to match. Is that correct or am I just pulling that out of my butt?
Nope, not from your butt. A neighbor used to work for a place in Charleston that's the importer for a big percentage of the pearl stuff. It's not abalone but it is some kind of fish scales.
I've had painters tell me the nightmare with pearls is that as the carrier fluid (the paint) hits the car the pearl particles are 'aligned' a certain way depending on the spray gun angle etc. The trick is to match the 'alignment' of the particles. Misalignment = you can instantly tell what panel was painted even if the color is perfect. Metallics are typically made with aluminum particles, they aren't as prone to this 'misalignment' but it can still happen.
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