Colour match for touch up problem
 

Hi.. I have just bought and used a custom car match aerosol from Paintnuts.. £17.99..My Rover 75 1.8 2004 has a paint code LEF.. Which is listed in the paint match book as grey.. In my logbook the car is brown and it is actually metallic light fawn.. A sort of cross between silver grey and very light brown.. The aerosol colour is definitely grey and I now have a problem because it in no way matches my car colour.. Does anyone know or has used an off the shelf colour from another Marque that is a good match? There are plenty of similar colour cars about.. even saw a new BMW with a similar colour.. Any help much appreciated.... Mike

Lacquer behaves differently once it is applied to the bodywork. It also depends on the primer that is used. According to colour code a paint should be 100% the same. Unless the original paint is discoloured, but that is not very likely. Depending on the size of the surface to be treated, you have to use different techniques. The colour is a combination of the used primer colour, lacquer and clearcoat finish, in combination with the light. What do you need to repair and how big is it? You can take a piece of material and make a paint sample of it and put it next to the car for comparison and to see if there is a difference in colour. If so, the company either needs to measure the paintwork or they didn't do it right the first time. But usually they do it right based on the colour code.

As you say LEF is listed as X Power Grey, has your car been resprayed prior to your ownership?

Your best solution is to take a paint sample, filler cap, mirror hood, to a good paint shop where they can match paint by both code and spectrophotometer.


My youngest son with the garage uses one to match paint on older cars and some newer ones where there are fading problems with usually reds and yellows being the culprit and a paint supplied by code only stands out against the faded paint or when a vehicle in the past has been painted in a custom colour, with no code available.


Or as he says, custom colour when he and my older son used to build and modify ' sheds ' was a case of ohhh I wonder what adding a drop of this that and the other will look like not measuring anything and just like cooking the same way, you can end up with a fantastic result, but wll never be able to repeat it.


They may also be able to tell you if it is actually X Power Grey or a variant and be able to supply the code for your actual paint.

Tempest grey aka X Power grey:cool:
https://www.the75andztclub.co.uk/for...1c48533d66.jpg

Hi many thanks for your help.. Azur, Kwil and Ducati 750.
The car is standard and never been resprayed so I'm taking into a paint sprayer to get it done properly.. The original areas were quite small really being the edge of the nearside front wing where someone had eased out of a parking space and took the paint off.. And the nearside passenger door rear edge where again paint had been scuffed off and a little rust had occurred. However after my attempt of `blowing it in` with ehe wrong colour, I have made the problem bigger. I also attempted to wipe my painting off the rear door with thinners.. but that took off some of the original paint.. So don't do that..!! Consequently it's going to a skilled specialist.. Have got away with it in the past (on other cars..) but the colour match being bad has given me a real headache..!

I always feel that any spray job is gonna show. If a door/wing/boot/bonnet can be replaced then it will match no question. Dunno what the membership feels about this.

I'm no expert, but I wouldn't have thought that ordinary paint thinners would damage a modern 2K paint finish - any bodyshop experts here who could offer an opinion?

A good spray job by someone who really knows their trade should be pretty much undetectable. I had some paint work done on my Lagoon some years back following an RTA and it looks 100%. It wasn't cheap though!

Cliff

Is 2k the same as 2pak? To-day's paints are water based (as far as I am aware).

Kev

I believe so :}

Cliff