Have you ever wondered how professional car refinishers so perfectly match the original colour of your car when it needs a panel and paint repair?
When a paint technician matches the colour of a car to repaint an area that has been damaged and repaired there is much to consider in getting the colour correct. These days there are literally thousands of colours and many tricky specialty finishes including metallic, 3 layer pearlescent and even candy colours to name a few. A professional painter’s job is to match the colour to the original paint so when the job is complete it’s like the damage was never there. It would be fair to say the vast variety and specialty finishes car Manufacturers are bringing out are certainly making a Spray Painters’ job more challenging.
When painting an area of a car it’s not only the colour a paint technician needs to nail but also the application so the peel matches what is already on the car. The term “Orange peel” refers to the texture of the finish, generally, the flatter the paint the better the finish is. Most high-end European cars have a glass-like finish where whereas the mid-range manufacturers often have more noticeable ripples that look similar to the peel of an Orange when looking closely. Today we’re just focusing on colours.
The first thing to look for when mixing paint is the manufacturer’s colour code. Every vehicle manufacturer provides a colour code and this is most often on the serial plate which can be located in a number of places on a vehicle including under the bonnet, in the glove box and in door jams. The serial plate looks like the one in the pic below which also shows where the paint code is on this plate.
This colour code is the first step and the key to mixing a near-perfect match. Once the code is located it is entered into a software/database system provided by the paint manufacturer, the software will then provide the correct colour tinters that are required to mix the colour including what quantity to mix measured using highly accurate weight scales (as seen in pic). Every paint & panel repair shop has a full paint system of between 70 and 100 tinters (depending on the Paint system) that can mix every colour available. In a mobile operation, this paint system is shrunk into smaller bottles so it fits tidy in a drawer (see pic).
In the absence of a paint code or where the code has been used but for some reason is not accurate the traditional technique to match colours is by using swatch colours. This is basically thousands of colours sprayed out on cards with very close variants of each colour, no different to what you might find at Bunnings when matching house paints, just a lot more variants. The key is finding the swatch that most closely matches the car colour matching it by eye…. and then using the code on the back of the swatch to create the colour. Variations in car paint colour and manufacturer codes can occur for a number of reasons including slightly different paint batches on cars from factory to paint that has faded in the elements over the years to the surface it is being applied….bumper bars for example are plastic and the same paint applied on a bumper bar and metal panel will nearly always have a variation in colour which is often very noticeable from factory. Take a look at your own car where the bumper bar meets the quarter panel, especially in the right light you will nearly always see a difference and once you see it you can’t unsee it but there is nothing that can be done about it as the exact same paint was used on both panels.
When matching and mixing paint a good paint technician will have excellent tinting skills and be able to add or subtract tinter colours using his / her eye and keep adjusting and spraying out on cards until the colour is within an acceptable percentage of variance. Years of experience help in knowing and understanding which tinters to add.
The more modern method of matching colours quickly and easily is by using a small handheld device known as a spectrometer. This is a high-tech device that captures accurate colour readings of any vehicle even when the colour is custom, vintage or another challenging finish. It reads the paint by holding the device and inbuilt the camera against the paint on the vehicle to be matched. In under a second the machine measures the amount of light and the exact hues on the car’s current paint finish.
This device doesn’t require the manufacturer’s colour code and will save a lot of time on challenging colours. A spectrometer offers a paint refinisher the ability to match a colour quickly and very accurately but even with this technology there will be times when the colour is not close enough and the Paint technician needs to resort to his experience to make some final adjustments. The cost to buy a spectrometer can vary between $3000 and $10,000 depending on the manufacturer and requires a laptop to run the software.
Once the paint has been mixed and the match determined the paint is filtered and poured into the spray gun ready for application.
