UKC

I ordered some metallic paint to paint a car panel recently and the colour was miles off despite being a common colour on that vehicle. The supplier said that the paint colour changes over time so their colour was the correct spec. The difference in shade was so stark that I kind of think he was fobbing me off but either way I'd like to find somewhere that can match a sample.

I've contacted a couple of paint shops to see if I can send a sample off to be matched but not heard anything back and wondered if anyone had any recomendations?

Ben

In reply to Sharp:

Chips Away type blokes mix paint on the spot to match your aged/faded paint. So the technology exists.... You could just get one of these guys to do a panel tidy up for you and get benefit of their expertise and equipment. I guess that most body shops can do it but whether they are willing to simply mix and dispense a quantity of paint for you to then use may be another matter.

Paints4u are generally good but colours like red/yellow etc are horrific for fading over time and for these colours I'd normally go to a local factors who can mix paint and use a spectrograph to get the exact match. You also normally blend into adjacent panels for this reason. That said, some paint suppliers/bodyshops are just awful at matching paint. You only have to take a look in a Tesco carpark to see some well executed (ie professional quality finish) paint jobs with a colour match that does anything but match.

In reply to Sharp:

metallics are particularly hard to match as the air pressure originally used in painting affects the way the aluminium chips lie in the paint. not only do you have to match colour but also try and match the lie of the chips!

In reply to Sharp:
Thanks for the responses, I'll keep looking. Just waiting for a couple of places to get back to me. It's epsom green that I'm trying to match and most of the painting is internal so it's not essential that it matches perfectly but the one I tried was way off.

I'm reluctant to get a shop to do it because it's just a tidy up job, I've got a decent enough set up for spraying and stripping it down inside to spray is something I can potter away with myself but would probably cost a fortune to get done professionally.

In reply to Sharp:

I'v used metallic nail varnish to match the silver grey paint on a skoda...meant it as a temporary job to keep it from rusting, but it lasted as long as the car and turned out to be a better match than the official touch up paint.