01 dakota color match

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PostPosted: Fri Jan 10, 2020 10:33 pm
I have a silver 01 Dakota R/T. I need to repaint the bed side and the roof. I know that some paint shops can scan your paint and mix up paint for you, but how close can they get it? Close enough to not have to do any blending?

Are silvers generally hard to match?

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PostPosted: Fri Jan 10, 2020 11:36 pm
Well, yeah, take your gas cap filler door in and let them have at it.....Silvers? No blending? That would be a rare day... maybe stand on one foot, light incense, and pray to the paint gods... Seriously, one thing that helps is don't cheap out with economy bases. Also, take a good look at the color of the primer underneath that paint package. We are all finding out from the other pros on here that due to the transparency of a lot of these base colors you need to get that primer right as well.
Silver....I've only got away with no blending on one car and that was just because the paint had been shot and garaged 2 years before....
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 11, 2020 12:49 am
:goodpost: for what its worth I would drive it to my local paint jobber and give them the color code then ask for the alternet cards. take the cards out and compare them to your finish in the sun and shade also at different angles. I have had good results with the computer scans but I have also NOT had good results. as Darrel said you MIGHT get lucky and get it close but blending to the adjacent panels is the way to go.
Jay D.
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 11, 2020 6:49 am
The truck is from AZ, and at one point the owners had the bedside and roof painted (at a body shop) because the clear coat was failing... The shop that did it, did a poor job and the paint failed again a few years later... so it probably needs to go down to bare metal and start fresh on those panels.

I'm considering repainting the whole truck, but I don't really have a big enough compressor (and no 220v in the garage.) My uncle does have a big enough compressor, but he has a gravel floor in his "shop."

I don't want to pay a ton of money to get the truck painted (its not worth it.)

I really have 3 options.

1. Paint it in my garage (and do a little paint booth, one section at a time. Bed side, beside, cab/doors. front clip, bumpers and tailgate.

2. Paint it at my uncles, wet the floor, and plan doing a lot of wet sanding to remove the trash.

3. Do all the prep work and take it to maaco and hope for the best.

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PostPosted: Sat Jan 11, 2020 8:54 am
If you want it to last more than a couple of years then stripping it to metal is the way to go.
Have you painted a vehicle before?

The gravel floor wouldn't scare me as much as a dirt floor would. You would need to set up some good ventilation in any environment you plan to spray in.
1968 Coronet R/T


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PostPosted: Sat Jan 11, 2020 9:07 am
We have to do a lot of "improvised" shooting on different work sites, at different shops/warehouses, etc.,
#1. Nope, yeah, yeah, I know a truck seems like it is sections. If you do piece by piece with silver, trust me, it will probably look like you did it in sections.
#2.This is the one I could make work....Buy a nice big roll of 6 mil polyfilm (double up on the thickness) and stake it to the ground, letting a 6 foot wide apron extend out of the building. Tape out the edges to the bottom of the building. I made furring strips with landscape pins mounted through them to get the plastic down. We did this at an old neighbors garage to do a truck. Series of box fans at the garage door with it down on top of them. Filter media roll stretched over the back of the fans. We had cleaned the building down pretty good, put the plastic down extending it about 1 foot up the walls for taping, slowly drove the truck in, and then put the furring strips down.
#3. This is a crap-shoot my friend. One of my car show buddies tried this recently....He said the manager at his store could barely speak English enough to understand what he wanted done. He talked to him for a half hour or so and finally gave up....ended up shooting it himself.... If you are even thinking about going this route look around for one of the semi hobby type guys in your area. Just use some common sense and see some of their work or talk to their two last customers.....
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 11, 2020 3:01 pm
I use to know and old fellow that specialized in restoration and paint work on 55,56,57 T-BIRDS, that's all he did. his paint booth had a gravel floor and fans that forced filtered air into the booth. his paint jobs were amazingly clean, near perfect.
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 11, 2020 4:02 pm
Yep, old guy that lived 2 doors up from my old farmhouse had one of those home weather station things in his house and would shoot OUTDOORS on gravel. Turned out some beautiful full boat Cadillac's and Buicks.
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 11, 2020 9:44 pm
BCP wrote:I know that some paint shops can scan your paint and mix up paint for you, but how close can they get it? Close enough to not have to do any blending?

Are silvers generally hard to match?


I think that it's worth reiterating how a paint company's system and spectrophotometer system works.

As we already know, manufacturers cannot maintain consistency of their colours even in the same factory, let alone from plant to plant, sometimes in different countries. So, each paint company takes samples from each factory and creates what are known as 'variants' of that colour. This then provides those of us in the refinishing industry with a series of better matches. The bigger the paint company the more resources they're likely to have and, usually, the greater the number of variants that have been formulated to enable us to get a closer match. As mentioned above, more resources are usually put into that paint company's premium line, so you're much more likely to get a closer match than with a small company or an economy line.

Cards, or chips are then produced of the most common variants to provide a quick way of choosing a variant for those shops that don't have a spectrophotometer. In the Dupont/Axalta system there are many variants for each colour. One Toyota silver has is excess of 130 different variants. Producing chips for each of these would be pretty much impossible so you may not get a good match using this system.

Enter the spectrophotometer. This takes a reading, at 3 different angles, of the colour that you're trying to match. When connected to the computer, the software then finds the closest matches to these readings and presents them as alternatives. Having the formulae and readings from all the variants obviously means getting much closer than just the few for which chips were made. Of course, accuracy is highly dependent on how well the reading was taken. Usually the surface needs to be polished so that the spectro can 'see' the colour best, without readings from oxidisation or scratches changing the reading. The software then attempts to 'shade' or adjust the formulae of the best matches to get closer to what is actually on the car, hopefully accounting for things like fading.

Sometimes the system can get very close, almost always close enough to blend, but rarely close enough for an edge to edge match. At this point we have to make the decision whether to blend or to try to improve the match, visually. This means doing spray out cards and then manually adjusting the colour before another spray out card. Sometimes one gets lucky and gets it fairly close after 2 or 3 cards. Other times it can take hours of work. The labour cost of getting such a perfect match is rarely justified, so blending is the usual choice. If the car has been previously repaired then the chances of getting a match are slim.

Silvers are notoriously difficult to match, so again, blending is the better choice.

The choice to blend, and where, can be dictated by the panel you have to paint. I many cases a roof is delineated by covers over roof rack tracks or with gutters. Quite often these are wide enough that a small difference in colour won't be noticed. A similar thing may apply to the side of your tub which may have a quite large gap between it and the cab. Alternately look at the damaged area of the panel and decide whether is is actually necessary to paint all the way to the edge. Consider too things like changes in angle that will reflect light differently and may hide or at least disguise a colour variation if not too great.
Chris

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