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The first stage of colour matching, after identifying the basic colour, is a trip to your paint supplier with either the car or a piece of the original painted bodywork. They should have a full set of colour variant cards to help decide on the correct shade. More upmarket outlets should also have a spectrometer available, which in some cases can even be used to provide a paint formula from scratch. The required shade, once chosen, can then be mixed by the supplier who hopefully is skilled in the art of accurate paintmixing. Paint formulas are graduated down to 0.1 of a gramme, and whilst good paint suppliers realise the need for absolute accuracy, some staff do not always show the same enthusiasm.
Metallic colours present their own problems. As well as being available in the same never-ending range of colours and variations, application techniques also play a major part in colour matching.
Depending on the type of refinish paint used, metallics have the ability to:
Match perfectly when viewed face on, but look different/darker/lighter when viewed at an angle; become darker if applied heavily; become lighter if applied in light coats; vary the shade by varying air pressure, paint viscosity, type of thinners, ambient temperature, type and setup of spraygun - in other words there are many more ways to produce a bad match even with the correct paint.
Newer basecoats go some way to remedy these problems, but the variations possible make `blending' of metallic repairs a very attractive proposition to avoid colour matching difficulties in the first place. Blending the basecoat colour over a larger area than the actual repair will produce an invisible repair when done correctly.
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