I’ll admit I know nothing about paint. I took my Cougar to a professional paint shop and they used some kind of special camera to read/match the paint and said it was a 100% match. I used a small paint brush and starting touching up the spots on my car. Of course it doesn’t match 100%
So my question is…is there a way to blend/buffer/polish or something to get those spots to blend in better. My paint is pretty rough, thin and doesn’t appear to have any kind of clear coat. The new touch up paint is slightly lighter than what’s on the car.
It sounds like you need to go back and ask them to darken up your touch up paint a bit so it matches. It won’t ever make perfect touch up unless you sand the area down and then spray a larger area than the damage in order to hide the repair.
Matching old paint is more of an art form. The newer color match technology is amazing but over the years the color of the paint can vary from one part of the car to another.
Hopefully someone at the shop that mixed up the touch up paint can adjust or you might check to see if there is someone that does touch-up work for a living. You may need more that one color depending on the part of the car. Have a local guy here that is just amazing. Took 30 min to just match “Fawn”.
Royce is correct as always that it takes repair of a larger area to really blend in the paint. Will always look “touched up” otherwise.
Thanks Royce and Cavallino! I’ll go by the paint shop and just ask them if they can do me another batch just a little bit darker. I’ll go with that for now, since it’s just a driver and not ready for a complete redo.
If you’re just filling in some small chips and scratches, I’d try painting them with a shade or two darker color first, let that dry and then put your touch-up paint on top of that. Might save you the cost of another batch of custom paint. If you’re doing larger areas, you’re probably never going to get a perfect match from a single batch of paint because each part of your car has probably faded different amounts.
The use of a spectrophotometer will not guarantee an 100% color match. It takes that device and a trained eye to perfectly color match your paint. Go back to them and request a better match. I use a local automotive paint supplier who has perfectly eye matched paint for several of my cars. Good luck and let us know how it works out.
Even though their computer said it was a 100% match it was lighter. I went back today and had them mix another small batch just a little darker blue. I’ll try it this weekend. If it’s too dark, I’ll just mix some of the lighter back with it. If it’s still off, they told me to come back next week and they will make it darker.
I’m just getting 6 ounces of touch up. It’s only $15.