So, let me just say up front that I'm fussy about the colors on my cars. For example, I bought my '69 Mach 1 in large part because I was thrilled with the car's color. The paint code on the tag says it was Silver Jade, and I made the assumption that when the car had been repainted, it had been repainted the factory color, because it looked like the silver jade color in a book I have. At Drag Week in 2005 the trunk lid took a hit from the trailer, and I wanted to fix it and repaint it. So, I went to the paint store and got a quart of silver jade paint. But when I painted the trunk lid, it looked much more silver, less green, than the rest of the car. Apparently the color was not quite the same as the original color.
The guy at the paint shop said that he had a color analyzer gun that would match any paint, so rather than stick the trunk lid back on there with a big mismatch I unbolted the front valance panel from the car, and brought it in to the paint shop. The gun the guy had used a round rubber seal that he pressed up against the valance panel, and when he pulled the trigger I guess a light turns on inside the seal and some kind of an electronic device looks at the paint. The gun gave a digital readout that the guy was able to convert to a paint formula. He mixed me up a quart and off I went to repaint the trunk lid. Bottom line though was even though the paint was much closer, it still wasn't a perfect match to the rest of the paint on the car. It still looks a little too silver, without enough green in it. Hmmmmm...
After getting my Shelby clone painted this summer I continued my mad thrash to try to make it to Drag Week. At first I thought the paint looked great, but after a few weeks of looking at it I began to get the feeling that it wasn't quite what I wanted. It was close, but not quite right. The color seemed too light to me. Not that it doesn't look great, because it does, but as mentioned earlier I'm fussy about this. I tried to confirm this feeling over the weekend. When I first got going on this project I did a search on the internet for 69 Shelby's painted Gulfstream Aqua, and found several cars that looked just the way I wanted mine to look. This weekend I pulled up those pictures, and some pictures of my car, and compared the colors. See the photos below:
See the difference? The real Gulfstream Aqua car is darker blue than mine. This almost ruins the car for me, because its not the color I wanted; I wanted the color shown in the bottom photograph. I'm seriously considering repainting my car. The problem, of course, is matching the color I want. I had taken the paint code to the paint store (a different store than what I used for the Mach 1), but the paint they mixed for me was wrong, at least based on my memory of what Gulfstream Aqua looks like, and the other pictures of cars I found painted that color on the internet.
So here is my question: Why is this happening? Is this inaccuracies when the paint is mixed? I wonder if the paint companies have taken paint codes that are close and combined them to make their jobs easier? (The reason I mention this is that I had a Ditzler coder for Gulfstream Aqua, but according to the paint store guy the color was no longer available from Ditzler, and he had to get it using their lower cost Omni paint line instead). Is my only option to spray a test panel and try to adjust the color from there? That would be a questionable approach to me, although I'm willing to try it.
If I decide to repaint my Shelby clone I'm going to need to make sure the color is right before I spray, and in addition my Mach 1 is approaching the time where it will need paint, and I want to make sure it's right also. Any comments or suggestions are appreciated. Thanks, Jay
