The most important steps when carrying out paintwork repairs are as follows:
- Identify the foundation under the paint.
- Establish the method of repair in line with extent of the damage and the underlying foundation material.
- Carrying out the preliminary operations prior to applying the finishing paint in accordance with specifications.
- Select the colour, carrying out colour matching if necessary.
- Adjust the finishing paint in line with the colour, surface texture and gloss of the production paintwork.
- Maintain the specified material coating thicknesses flash-off time and drying temperatures.
Yet the main area where so many others fail is colour matching.
The images below show an example of poor colour matching. Although this may be a little hard to tell from just a photo, it demonstrates why colour matching is so important when carrying out paintwork repairs.
Photo 1: Here the door has been repainted. You can see that the colour of the new paint has a less yellow tone than the panel next to it.
Photo 2: In the same job, the person who repaired this car also. sprayed this front panel. Again, a difference can be seen between the new paint and the original colour of the door.
To be able to match colours correctly, you must understand where colour matching goes wrong and to explain that, you must understand the colour of an object depends on three things:
- The colour of the light falling on it.
- What the object is made of - its colour and material.
- The response of the eye and brain (fig1).
For example, two colours may look the same under certain lighting conditions, whereas if we take them out into clear day light they look quite different, therefore something which looks green in daylight (fig.2) will lookdull yellow (fig.3) under a yellow sodium lamp. This is because green is made up of both yellow and blue and only the yellow is reflected back to the eye under the yellow lamp.
