First colour coats
Take care of that elbow Nigel.
Having worried for weeks about blending in metallic paint I finally read a book. It’s called “Vehicle Painters Notes
Turns out blending metallic is easy. Metallic paint consists of base coat followed by a couple of coats of lacquer. For blending in you would mix metallic 50:50 with the lacquer and spray slightly further than the edge of the repair with the metallic base coat. Then mix 25:75 and spray a little further into the rest of the panel. Finally mix 10:90 and spray the whole panel.
Metallic is less forgiving to spray than solid colour. I was having problems with solid colour a couple of years ago, then took a long hard look at my old spray gun (with the damaged nozzle). It went into the bin and I bought a new gun that was actually suited to my compressor output. Great results with solid colour since then, but it’s been a while since I sprayed metallic.
The metallic finish was good, but the colour was wrong!
The Aston was resprayed (badly) in the ’80s. The colour is nice, but it’s slightly lighter and not quite as green as the original Tourmaline paint. That’s annoying.
Options from here are to blend in some special paint matched brew from the paint shop, or to return the whole car to the original colour (probably the job of a paint shop as I wouldn’t be confident with metallic over a large panel area).
On the plus side even I can’t see the join in the aluminium wings.
May 12th, 2006 at 10:48 am
Fabulous job as usual Malcolm. Matching paint codes is hellishly difficult, especially on older cars that may have faded, or as the OI, been resprayed before.
The trouble with matching by eye, is that it all looks fine until you park under a sulphur street lamp - hey presto harlequin Aston.
This is where I have the advantage with ROJ, complete bare metal respray.
Looking foreward to Santa Pod next week.
This is the job I was best at during my car restoration course, so am really looking foreward to it.
June 7th, 2006 at 8:33 pm
Blending Metallic - Important reading!!!
The book was only half right. Base coat is easy. Mixing metallic with lacquer makes the job worse than doing it with cellulose. I’m not sure whether the stuff is too thick or takes too long to dry, but either way it’s worse than doing the job with celly. I ended up with a blotchy finish which needed completely sanding off and anothetr couple of coats of base coat.
My advice - blend the struff in the normal way - complete coat to mist. That works well.