Making obsolete paint.
Posted: Fri Nov 19, 2010 7:41 pm
I took a side cover to the paint store I deal with today, and between myself and one of the techs I know there we concocted a batch of the original lime gold for my 69 Titan restoration.
As he said, mixing back in those days was pretty simple so it had to be a no more than three colours. We knew it was a rather large metallic flake silver so after dialing in the program on the PC for the scale he added about 10% of that base to a one pint tin. Then in went some mid orange tint we both agreed looked close to what it might be and then some mid to dark coloured metallic yellow/green with an iridescent cast to it.
Wow,, the results were inspiring and we agreed we were already better than 95% correct. As he worked the ratios on the screen and wrote them down, he weighed the percentages and fiddled with the orange and green colours some more.
In about 5 minutes we had the numbers correct for our little batch, then he scaled them up to a pint in volume and then dialed in the values on the screen for that amount.
I'll tell you this, it now looks correct to whats on the side cover, and while its the original paint on there, it could be faded a bit too. Now to getting around to stripping the fuel and oil tank of its present paint, doing some minor body work on them and prepping the other plastic parts.
Since I'm painting more small parts silver this weekend, I may drop a bit of the lime gold in the gun and test it on a piece of material, then clear it when I'm clearing those same parts.
By doing it this way I'll have an actual test strip to check the colour for a real world comparison against the paint on the oil tank.
As he said, mixing back in those days was pretty simple so it had to be a no more than three colours. We knew it was a rather large metallic flake silver so after dialing in the program on the PC for the scale he added about 10% of that base to a one pint tin. Then in went some mid orange tint we both agreed looked close to what it might be and then some mid to dark coloured metallic yellow/green with an iridescent cast to it.
Wow,, the results were inspiring and we agreed we were already better than 95% correct. As he worked the ratios on the screen and wrote them down, he weighed the percentages and fiddled with the orange and green colours some more.
In about 5 minutes we had the numbers correct for our little batch, then he scaled them up to a pint in volume and then dialed in the values on the screen for that amount.
I'll tell you this, it now looks correct to whats on the side cover, and while its the original paint on there, it could be faded a bit too. Now to getting around to stripping the fuel and oil tank of its present paint, doing some minor body work on them and prepping the other plastic parts.
Since I'm painting more small parts silver this weekend, I may drop a bit of the lime gold in the gun and test it on a piece of material, then clear it when I'm clearing those same parts.
By doing it this way I'll have an actual test strip to check the colour for a real world comparison against the paint on the oil tank.