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Spent 3 hours matching a paint code that was wrong on the cap
Customer brought in a 2018 Civic with a busted bumper. Cap on the inside of the door said R-81 Crystal Black Pearl. Mixed up a pint, shot a test card, and it was way off. Looked more like a dark gray. After digging around I found a sticker under the hood that said they repainted the whole car two owners ago. The cap was from the factory but the car had been resprayed with a different black. Ended up having to pull a fuel door sample and eyeball the tint. So much for trusting the code. Anyone else run into a mismatch like that and waste a whole afternoon?
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taylor_hayes2514d ago
Oh man, that "wasted a whole afternoon" bit hit close to home. My buddy Jake had a 2015 Mustang he was fixing up after a fender bender, and the code on the core support said Oxford White. He mixed up a quart, sprayed a test panel, and it came out looking like a dirty cream color. Turns out the previous owner had painted the front clip with some random Ford white from a different year. He spent like four hours running back and forth to the paint shop trying to fix it. Ended up having to sand down his test spray and start over with a camera match from the rear quarter panel. Total nightmare and he was cussing the whole time.
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mila_perry1314d ago
Poor Jake, that sounds like a total headache. Nothing worse than trusting a color code only for it to be totally wrong on the car. It's amazing how much time and money gets burned up just trying to fix a previous owner's shortcut.
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the_charlie14d ago
I used to think color codes were pretty much bulletproof, like you could just look up the paint code and be done with it. But stories like Jake's totally flipped that for me. It's wild how much a previous owner can mess things up just by grabbing whatever can of spray paint was lying around. Now I'm paranoid about blending and matching from a hidden panel instead of trusting the door jam sticker. Honestly it's a good reminder that the code is just a starting point, not the final answer.
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