Paint color

In my engine drop thread John asked about final color. Nothing like color and metallic to generate lots of opinions, debates and posts. But since it was asked….

After futzing for 2 years and probably 30 different samples mixed, the main body color is what you see on the front cowl. It was chosen and painted two weeks before the engine drop so I could install the insulation and firewall.

I am very fussy over color. On the Packard in the background I started from a non-metallic Packard color “Dawn Gray”. It was a bit too “warm” or “fleshy” for my taste and I mixed several other colors before arriving at something very similar to Dawn Gray but more neutral. The goal was a much lighter color that was still somehow conservative befitting a Classic sedan. A lighter color tends to give an impression of more length, and my Packard Eight is known as the “short wheelbase sedan” with 5″ shorter hood than a Super or Twelve.

I think a number of original Pierce factory colors look very good and obviously appropriate to the cars. However, I have never been fond of black, damn-near-black blue, or damn-near-black green monotones. Those colors can look fantastic when you are standing very close looking into a perfect paint job with incredible depth, but they do nothing to highlight the beautiful lines of 1930’s cars from a distance. I have been enamored with the flowing fender lines of early ’30’s cars since I was a kid (yes Virginia, arguably the most beautiful aircraft ever built was the Lockheed “Super G” Constellation). I would have preferred a 1933 or 1934 Packard rather than my ’36 since they look really good two toned with dark fenders and a complimentary lighter body color.

My Pierce is a 1935 and the dark fender/light body motif was passe, but they did have three factory combinations where those heavy belt moldings were painted in a complimentary lighter color. One was “Patricia Blue” and “Alpha Blue”. I obtained both mixed from original Ditzler formulas. Nice idea, but to my eye the colors simply were too “muddy” and actually didn’t compliment each other very well. It might have been the Ditzler pigments themselves had aged and threw the colors off. I wanted a grayish blue without being too dark to start with. I found on my Packard that you simply can’t tell how a color is going to look until you paint it on the car. On pieces of metal painted with the actual paint I cannot see the difference between the lighter belt molding colors seen in the picture at the front of the front door and the back of the front door. Actually on the car and seen against the darker body color they are very different.

I tried metallics and non-metallic, there are combinations painted on the other side of the car as well. Adding to the complexity was substituting only the super fine aluminum flakes for any course flakes in the formulas in keeping with 1930’s metallics. That changes the tone. In the end there was one basic color that I liked the best, but it was too light, so I experimented with cutting the amount of metallic within the same formula to darken them.

The color on the cowl is the same as above and below the front door belt molding (“metallic cut in half”). “Starting formula”, “metallic cut in half”, and “metallic cut by 70%” are all the same formula except for the amount of fine aluminum.

Also, I thought about substituting aluminum for pearlescent which might be very elegant and in keeping with the notion that the original metallic used fish scales in aluminum. I tried to research it though, and I couldn’t find any evidence that fish scales were used in the early 30’s Ditzler/Duco mixes. Does anyone know for sure?

Ask for the time and an engineer tells you how to build a watch…..

Jim