Hey you guys with painting and and mixing paint experience, I'm looking at respraying my '91 Z28 this year. I'm going to stick with the original ultra blue metallic color but I'm toying with the idea of adding double the amount of silver flake to the mix. (or maybe more?) ....or is it blue flake I should be adding?

Has anyone done this, or can you tell me what it's going to look like? I'm pretty sure what will happen is it will lighten the blue color a bit almost making it more of a blue/grey with more silver sparkle... would I be correct?

...or am I approaching this the wrong way? My goal is to have the same color blue but with more silver flake in the direct sun. And no, I don't want it to look like a bass boat, but something just a bit more special then the original color.


Thanks for your input and replies in advance.

 

If you'd like a color thats similar but slightly different, I recommend looking through your body shop's chip decks and picking one of those (assuming you're having it professionally painted). Then if they need to mix more for another coat or if you ever get in an accident the paint will match.

But to answer your question, silver will lighten it up it and pay make it sparkle in the sunlight more if its a coarse metallic. Its hard to say what more blue pearl will do. Also it depends on what colors are in your formula. A lot of blues don't have any silver metallic in them at all, and if so, not much. If you're curious you can give me your paint code and I can look it up for you.

 

ZsTransAm thanks for the reply. Judging by the original color it does appear to have some sort of metallic in it, I was just thinking that I would like to add more. I'm going to repaint the vehicle myself and purchase the paint at my local Napa store. The paint code is WA9591 or 98U.

Here is an older picture of my car (it doesn't look nearly as nice anymore due to the clear peeling off)

 

The names and amounts of toners in your color will change depending on which paint line you are using, but it'll probably be similar. Using PPG waterborne, mixing 10 oz of paint, you have:

164g transparent blue
69g rich blue
61g medium metallic
5g weak white

So you don't have any pearl at all. Your metallic is on the low-medium level of coarseness. Theres a quiet a bit of metallic in it, so doubling the amount of silver is out of the question, it will change it waaay too much. You could try adding 10 percent more and going up from there on test panels to see if its what you like. I think this will wash out the blue and lighten up the color more than anything though. I'd rather see you keep the same amount of metallic, but replace the medium metallic with a coarser metallic. In my paint line the metallics go from the finest metallic at T471 to the coarsest metallic at T479. Yours is T473. If you were using my paint line I'd recommend replacing with T475, T476 or even T479 for some real pop in the sunlight.

Though as a disclaimer- I've mixed paint thousands of times but I've never mixed custom paint. I'm making educated guesses at what will happen and what would work best, you won't know until you make some sprayouts.

 

ok cool you gave me a great breakdown of this color, thank you! You are correct indeed with the test panels, I think what I will do is get a couple half quarts mixed up and spray them on a test panel and see what they look like. Thanks again.