A year or 2 ago, I had to try to match a paint color for a UK aircraft to
tell a shop what to paint a item that was to be installed in the aircraft. I
spoke to tech reps at a Cortaulds, at PPG and at a British firm. What they
told me is that even though you may have the paint code, you can never
"exactly" match paint unless you have a paint sample and can have it
computer scanned. The reason is that even though the code is "universal" and
tells a manufacturer what components to mix together in what ratios,
including whether it is to be flat, semi-gloss, gloss, etc., the actual
color you get after painting depends on a number of factors -- the machine
that is doing the proportioning, the operator who is doing it, where the
individual pigments come from (!!! yes -- they said it makes a difference
where the pigments came from -- if one manufacturer gets the pigment from a
different source, it will be a slightly different shade than one from
another source), and also which batch of components. This is why
manufacturers will tell you that you should try to buy paint from a single
batch that will be enough to do the whole paint job, and if you have several
containers of it you should do a little mixing together of them because you
will even have variation between the individual containers even if they came
from the same batch.
Roy
'60 TR3a TS63103LO (in restoration)
techman@metrolink.net
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