Why does nobody talk about how bad some shops are at color matching?

I stopped by a shop in Portland last week to grab some supplies and noticed a customer's silver Accord sitting out front with a rear bumper that was three shades off from the rest of the car... it was so obvious even from across the lot. The manager came out and acted like he couldn't see it, blamed it on the lighting. Has anyone else run into shops that just don't bother with blending or using a spectrophotometer?

2 comments

2 Comments

ryan_carr592d ago

Honestly I kinda disagree here. Not every shop needs a spectrophotometer to do good work. Some old school guys get better results with a sprayout card and a good eye than most guys with a $2000 scanner. The problem is more about shops cutting corners on prep and clear coat rather than the color matching itself. Silver is especially tricky because metallic flake orientation can make the exact same formula look different under different lighting. Sometimes it's not bad matching, it's just bad blending technique or cheap materials.

quinn_nguyen2d agoTop Commenter

Pfff yeah that's rough. Portland's got some real hacks pretending they know paint. I saw a blue Civic once where the door was way off, like a totally different shade of blue, and the guy behind the counter tried to tell me it was "just the way the light hit it." Nah man, that's just bad work. A $20 color scanner and some basic skill would've fixed that.