Duco Magic

A neighbour came to me recently to fix up a small scratch and I couldn’t resist taking a pikkie of this colour matching effort.

The pictures tell the story but I believe that a colour for a different car was taken off the shelf and adjusted quickly to get the bonnet painted.

My client said he had never had it painted, so as it was the bonnet only that was affected, a car yard is the culprit.

I tell people all the time that this sort of thing is common. You see, car yards refuse to pay the proper cost of around $600 to have a bonnet resprayed. Instead panel beaters are allowed to charge about $300.

You, the buyer are the loser. Below is the same car but from a different angle!

See my “How to paint a car” e-book learning system for more re this.

Regards David Ashton

One of my clients came to me after having just purchased this car.

The previous owner had bought it 2nd hand from a franchised car yard – meaning high quality cars selling new Holden’s (GM), and one of the conditions of sale was that a small scrape be repaired.

Well it was repaired but what do you think of the colour match? Very good or very poor?

The latter is true. In my upcoming digital book “How to paint a car” I show you the whole process including this very chippy bar close up. Now why was it chippy??? – because not only did this guy use cheap crap paint, he couldn’t match a colour to save his life!!

Plus I will post a video here shortly showing you the repaired result and how I matched the colour, because the original repairer didn’t have a clue!!

I think the biggest challenge I face is fixing up other people’s colours. What I mean by that is if a car has already been painted at some stage, it’s a fair bet that when I come to mix the colour it will not match, sometimes the difference was black and blue.

This is typical especially if a panel beater is involved. Quite often rather than mix up the colour from the code, they’ll use an off the shelf one (already had it mixed) that was left over from another car. Maybe have a bit of a play with it and “if in doubt blend it out”.

So what happens is for example instead of one door getting painted, the whole side of the car does.

Because you can’t see both sides at the same time you’ll never know unless you spray the colour on a matching card and compare.

Here is a typical formula, which is a green. I think most of my competitors add more green to the colour when they need to make it “greener”.

Not so, that’s not how to colour match. In a future posting, I’ll be showing you how to colour match.

This is important if you are painting your car!!