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Appreciation post: The old-school body shop I saw in Memphis last week
They still had the original 1970s paint mixing room, with the big glass jars and hand-written formulas on the wall. Makes you miss when everything wasn't just a computer scan and a factory code, you know?
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grant.anthony5mo ago
That old way was cool but man, it was so easy to get a color match wrong. The computer scans now give you a perfect match every single time. I'll take the new tech for a better paint job any day.
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jessica9215mo ago
Perfect match? Those computer scans often miss the subtle shifts in old paint from sun damage or fading. A good eye can blend those variations better than a machine reading a single spot. You lose the art of matching the whole panel, not just a perfect square inch.
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jessica9213mo ago
And it's kinda like when I tried using one of those color matching apps to pick out paint for my living room. The app said "dusty rose" but on my walls it came out looking like bubblegum pink. Had to go back to the old method of just holding paint swatches up and squinting at them in different light.
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charles_baker285mo ago
My uncle's old truck had a repaint where they used a scanner. The door looked right under the shop lights, but in the sun you could see it was a totally different shade of red. The machine got the color from a clean spot under the trim, but the rest of the body had faded for twenty years. It takes a person to see how the color changes across the whole thing and mix to that worn look. The tech is just a starting point.
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