Project Fail
 

After much sanding and fitting of a new spoiler, fabricating a grill 3 times until I was happy, fabricating brake duct grills, laser cutting a polished stainless splitter, god knows how much prep and painting and buffing. Not to mention reassembly....the paint doesn't match well enough! Not sure why my car has more metallic and is slightly darker than the paint I bought. One of them is wrong, I just don't know which one.

Anyone have a Marine Blue Metallic paint chip so I can figure it out??

I'm happy with the look, but just a little pi$$ed off.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1390926932.jpg

I'd suggest you either take your fuel filler door or drive the whole car to your paint supplier. I use Finish masters here in FL, but I think all of the brand name paint outlets have a matching camera. The guy in the mixing room near me is a wizard. It's only a failure if you quit trying.

Nice work, looks good, good luck on the paint re-match.

Question... might you shed some insight regarding your grille work? Where'd you source, how'd you secure, etc.?

Also any other general valance installation tips would be appreciated as well if you don't mind...

I'm about to embark upon my dp style valance install.

TIA...

There's alot of things invovled in spraying metallic paints, air pressure, air temp, type of gun, if your looking for perfect match you'll most likely have to do some blending.

Paul,
I made the grill by lasercutting a perimeter frame about 3/8 of inch wide to fill the opening out of 12 ga. steel. TIG welded a couple (4) 90 degree brackets on the back side to attach to the spoiler and then welded perforated metal to the back as well. I tried woven cloth twice, but the perforated metal from McMaster Carr looked so much nicer. After powdercoating, it was done.

It would have been easier if that was what I tried first.

thanks

You may want to add a Blunt lip to your splitter.
If you ever hit someone with that, no matter who is at fault, you'll be paying for the rest of your life...

I believe I have the L35V touch up paint from the factory for my '87 930. Not sure if that is of any real help or interest to you. If so, I am happy to let you sample from it…

The work looks great.

Will

What I your paint code?

The code is L35V. I ran into a guy at cars & coffee last year here that had an identical car. I'm wondering if I can track him down to look at the paint and see which of mine is correct.

Thanks for the offer OldSpool, I may have to take up your kind offer if I can't find a larger sample. Or, I'll just try to get a closer match made. I'm on the fence.

The hard work paid off it looks good.

Metallic paints are very hard to match because the flake in the paint lays one way on the initial spray and then down the road may lay slightly different. The old trick of painting panels off the car and then bolting to the car does not work well if you had a door laying the right way and fender upside down. Suddenly they look different in the light when bolted upright. Alot of paint shops now have cameras that will analyse the panel and give you a close as you can get color match. You need a surface as suggested by previous Pelican about the size of the fuel door. It is portable so could go the shop and they can do it onsight. Good luck. Love the color . I have it on the inside of mine. Thanks Rob

Not sure if I would say "Project Fail", what you have looks great. Whenever you are undertaking major work as you have there is always the probability for ....

Looks great to me! Definitely a project WIN.

But to help answer your question, +1 on the comments about the metallic, and different level of stages in metallic paints, and thus the room for something to not come out exactly as it should.

Also, all paint, unless it never sees any light at all, fades to a certain degree. This is why the mixed-by-code color may not be an exact match.

So, if you want it to match, I would recommend having a professional 'fade' it into the adjacent panels. This is also noted above. Professionals do this all the time when just paint one panel. Find a good paint guy: he can paint each panel on a daily driver car, all at a different time, and fade it so you cannot tell the difference between panels. Really.

Take care,

That looks bad ass. Road kill beware!!!