matching car paint

Can Auto Body Shops Match Paint?

If your vehicle has been in an accident or has gained some dents and scratches from the joys of driving in Vancouver, you might be eager to get it restored to its original condition. And while the damage might be easy to fix, what about the paint job? Will you ever be able to get it back to its original colour and shine? And what if you have a custom paint job or a car whose colour has long been discontinued? Then what?

Here’s what you do.

You bring it into your trusted auto body shop and explain your situation. Then you come back a few days later and drive your car home, amazed that it looks like it just came off the manufacturing line.

For the more curious minded, you might be wondering exactly how that’s possible.

Thanks to advancements in technology, an experienced auto body shop will be able to match even the most obscure and nuanced paint tones. It’s pretty remarkable, and while experience plays a role in mixing and applying the paint, a lot of it comes down to the precision technology that’s available today. In fact, the process is down to such an exact formula that we’ve even met a colourblind paint matcher before — and he does an impeccable job!

As long as a person knows the ins and outs of the car paint industry, colour matching is pretty straightforward.

If a car has a standard factory paint job, the auto body specialist can search a database with the make, model and year and voila! They can order the exact colour from the manufacturer and apply it so that the match is seamless.

For a custom colour or one that’s been discontinued, one of the tools an auto body shop will use to match paint exactly is called a spectrophotometer. (Yes, it sounds cool, and yes, it is actually pretty cool.)

A spectrophotometer, an optical instrument for measuring the intensity of light relative to wavelength, is becoming a standard tool in auto body shops because they create fast and accurate colour readings of any vehicle, even ones that are tough to match. After the auto body specialist cleans the area (a very important step), they will take several readings to narrow in on the exact colour.

Then, using the reading, they can create a new colour by mixing and matching. And then they can use the spectrophotometer to test that colour against the original vehicle colour reducing any discrepancies at all and ensuring an exact match.

Gone are the days when an auto body shop will match the colour by creating a hue that’s as close as they can get. It’s happened all too often that the entire vehicle needs to get repainted because one panel is slightly different than the rest.

If you are looking for an auto body shop in Vancouver that is reliable and knows their way around exact colour matching, you don’t have to look any further than Grandcity. We have decades of experience in Vancouver and have given countless cars everything from a refresh to a complete paint job overhaul and we pride ourselves in our skills to offer an exact match for even obscure and custom colours

Contact us today — you’ll be happy you did!