The colour of love

There are very few poems written for panel beaters or their close cousins, spray painters, but JIM WARD says there should be more.

Finding a highly skilled, ethical panel beater is like finding a rare jewel on the beach: it doesn’t happen very often. In the decades I have dealt with them, I can count the truly excellent ones on one hand.

They tend to open, close, move premises, and change names with bewildering frequency, while structural changes often result in diminished service levels. If just one pivotal person leaves or retires, the repair quality immediately drops. But the can I want to open today contains paint – specifically, automotive 2K paint.

When you have a large national fleet, ensuring that the livery matches across the group and remains in specification is challenging. Paint fades with age, and whenever you insert new or resprayed trucks into an old fleet, the cry goes up that the paint doesn’t match. Well, it’s obvious that if you compare any five-year-old, weathered colour with a brand-new one, it won’t match – even if the paint code is identical. It is from here on, however, that things become murky.

What follows is a little-known secret: if you are trying to match a specific colour, spray painters will often ask for a sample sprayed onto metal, ideally onto the same primer they intend using on your vehicle. That piece is called a spray out. But pay close attention now, readers, for this is where truth can become hard to discern. You are entering the dark underworld of spray painters…

Before you trustingly hand over that spray out to the panel beaters (in exactly the correct shade required), ensure that you have made at least two of them and lock the other sample in a safe. More often than people realise, when you are called to come and check the painting, the panel beater will proudly hold “your” spray out sample against gleaming body panels already repainted – and it will be a perfect match. You might end the meeting and drive away with a warm feeling, thinking, “What nice people, they matched that difficult colour perfectly.”

Well, think again. What they don’t tell you is that they also sprayed your sample in the paint they’re using to repaint the trucks. So of course it is a perfect match – duh! Instead of leaving, demand more coffee and biscuits and whip your other sample out of your briefcase – the one you didn’t leave with them, but kept in your safe all along. Hold it up against their “perfect match”, then politely point out that their “Signal Red” is nothing like the Signal Red you required. The room tends to grow a bit quieter, and people grow a shade redder – they all know why the reds don’t match.

The backstory goes something like this. Maybe you specified Plascon Kansai PS6067 (one of their 87 shades of red). Not Ferrari Red, Fire Engine Red, Danger Red, or VW Signal Red, but that red – the only shade agreed to and signed off with your clients. The panel beaters agree to use only the specified paint, but once your back is turned, they substitute it with their own paint brand, mixing it themselves. Their spray painter, Fernando, is brilliant at colour matching – as everyone in Varkplaas knows. He blends five different base colours and pigments to create another red, close (but not identical) to the paint you asked for. They figure it’s close enough to pass muster.

Say their cheaper Gold Star paint costs them R435 a tin, whereas the premium quality paint is R765 a tin. If they need 45 litres for all the resprays, they can add a cool R15,000 to their bottom line, with you being none the wiser. But… “hulle weet nie wat ons weet nie”!

Red, the colour of love, is a notoriously difficult colour to match. Automotive paint has several components: base pigment, binder, dispersing agents, filler, additives, solvents, and drier. It also contains complex chemicals, including certain isocyanates, toluene, and acetates…. and that’s only a summary list. If paint supplier A sources Magenta pigment from Chile, but paint supplier B import theirs from India, they might produce paint mixed to the same formulation that results in non-identical shades, several tones apart. It is best practice to source from one outlet and specify that paint only – no substitutes. That way, every truck will look identical, no matter where they get resprayed.

If there are several depots, the marketing manager at each one will swear that theirs is the only correct shade, as per branding uniformity guidelines. In fact, over time, the local paint shops will have mixed paint to match the other trucks on site, all of which are faded and weathered. As every fleet operates in isolation, it is only when trucks get transferred between provinces that everyone kicks up a huge fuss because the colour looks different.

No one working still remembers exactly what the intended colour looked like, 30 years ago. Over time, each regional fleet drifts further and further away from its original colour. The vehicles vary in age, and whenever panel beaters match paint based on other trucks – as opposed to an unchanging paint specification – the net result is confusion. They may look the same until they are parked side-by-side; the truth becomes obscured.

I once laid seven different paint samples across a boardroom table and asked the client’s illustrious assembly of marketing, branding, and operations directors to kindly tell me which was their corporate colour. The blind samples were all noticeably different, and they all selected different ones, each director utterly convinced that their perception of the corporate colour code – as used in their province – was the only proper one. 

The only colour that they all agreed was completely wrong was, in fact, the paint spray out mixed exactly to their corporate Pantone paint code. Regional paint differences were so entrenched that no-one knew what was right anymore. Don’t let me even start on red/blue colour blindness and how differently we all perceive colour tones!

Red is not always the colour of love, but it is the colour of the Festive Season. On this note, may I wish all FOCUS readers safe travels and a Happy Christmas!