VCCA Home Forums TECHNICAL - GENERAL Body - Sheet Metal, Paint & Wood 1935 paint recipe

We are going to be painting a 35 Master Sedan Regimental Blue, code 191. Our paint supplier codes only go back to 1939. We do not have any of the color for matching as the car had been repainted black in the 70's.

Does anyone have the mixing recipe for this color, or is there a similar modern color?

Thanks!

Try these folks;

http://www.autocolorlibrary.com/

When I was building my '35 coupe back in the mid 70s, there was a club member who had converted old Chevy colors to modern (at the time) car colors. I still have that chart somewhere. I'll find it for you. I think he converted our color, Brainerd Blue to an Opel color.
The charts were published in the G and D. They should go back and find this info and publish the charts again. It would be very helpful.

Mike

Wayne Martin (now deceased) was the member who did a lot of the color matching in the seventies but even some of the colors and paint types available then are now hard to find.or no longer available.

The member was Wayne Martin. He matched color chips and rated how close the two chips appeared to be. Suspect the comparison was done with artificial lighting as in sunlight some of the comparisons that I have done (using color chips that were available to me) did not match as well as indicated. There are other problems using color chips for comparison. They do not always depict the original factory color accurately. There were slight differences in the "factory" paint colors batch to batch or lot to lot. Color chips age and the colors change due to storage conditions. Sunlight tends to lighten or darken depending on what pigments are used. Artificial light can be higher in UV wavelengths that change colors differently than sunlight. I have probably 10+ chips of "Cream Medium" and they all differ. Autocolor library uses information that technicians at PPG provided. Many years ago PPG techs compared color chips that they had or could find with stock colors. Stock colors are different shades of a color type not specifically used by any manufacturer. They generally are used by commercial customers on trucks, signs and other objects. They may be similar but different than colors used on automobiles. They typically do not have metallic or pearl additives. Since it has been probably 20+ years ago that the comparisons were made I don't remember exactly how they did the comparisons. Don't think it was with optical scanners but visual side by side comparison. Yes, I personally talked to one technician during that process. For a short time "color matched" paint was available through PPG. It was fairly quickly discontinued (think it proved too costly) and the "business" was sold to Autocolor.

All that above brings several things to mind. One is that the VCCA should establish a project to research, document and decide on the "factory" paint colors. Yes I know it is a BIG effort that would require many people, many years and likely never establish the "official" color for all the thousands of "factory" colors. But I am sure we could eventually eat the elephant! For those that wonder what that means it goes back to the question of "How do you eat an elephant?". The answer is "one bite at a time.

Thank you all for the help, much appreciated!

So, Chipper, if you've rested up after all that thinking and typing, is anyone sure that a match from Autocolor is better than a match from Wayne Martin?

Wayne called for 1973 Opel code 204KK, Regency Blue, as a match for Regimental Blue.
That is the color on my '35 Standard Coupe. I was mistaken, I thought we had used the Brainard Blue. The last time I had this color mixed was in the mid 90s.

Mike

Mike,
I am not sure whether Autocolor or Wayne colors are more accurate. Wayne matched the paint chips to any chips that he found and rated the match. PPG techs did the same. I would hope that the PPG color chips were stored under better conditions but I surely don't know for sure. The best would be to find protected painted surfaces that had not been repainted and then have them color analyzed with multi-wave length spectrometers.

In the end it will not likely end the debate. Just look at the process to determine the correct dark-blue gray engine color and the fact that there are still folks that either don't believe or believe their opinion is better than the group that researched it.

I didn't have any original blue on my car because it was Black. I did not really want black and Nancy especially liked blue. She picked the color from original paint chips and so now the car has been blue for more of it's life than it was black.
Unfortunately, it was painted with lacquer. It is cracked and flakey in many spots but it is part of its character now and it is unlikely I will repaint.

im interested to find out more your paint matches that you find are best

My 29-50 parts book lists 1935 Regimental Blue as Duco no. 24650494. Striping: Gold Bronze Delux SM1530AA Wheels: Commodore Delux 305.

Hope this helps.

Best,

Charlie

The mixing formula is
11 OZ of white
6 1/8 oz Prussian Blue
15 1/4 Oz dark blue (Chineese blue)
5/8 oz black

Steel wheels Commodore blue or Regimental
blue with gold stripe
Wire wheels black,, cream or red.

It looks like Regimental Blue was introduced March 10, 1935.

I just joined this forum last week and have found the wealth of knowledge and speed with which its shared to be incredible here, of what I've read so far. I still have a lot of the original factory paint left on some parts of the car, it was a dark green with black canvas or leather top, white canvas flaps(that's the best way I can think of so far to describe the lower section of the top) and black leather interior. Does anyone know how many greens were used in 1935 or which green would have been used on phaetons? Its pretty dark and a nice green, so I'm leaning towards using the original paint color but changing to a brown interior leather

green35phaeton
At the risk of hijacking the original thread (should really start a new 1).
If you can take a reasonable sized sample of the color to a friendly crash repair shop the paint man there will most likely be able to very near match it if yo cant find the correct formula though modern paints are different to 1935 paint

Looks like they had "Frosty Green and Willow Green", not much different in color.

There was only one (dark) green in 1935, Pinehurst Green. Frosty and Willow are 1936 colors.

Back on February 15 I made the proposal below.


Since that time virtually nothing has happened. That tells me in very clear terms that people on this site have little or no motivation to preserve information that might help restoration or preservation. If that is the case why does the VCCA exist? To keep from contaminating this thread I will also post in a new thread. Look for it if you are interested.

I reread this post several times over about a week when it was first posted but the scope of this project had me wondering what was possible and how to even begin such a detailed project. I will try to get the ball rolling...

The main things I struggle with is 1) the variations of any given colour and 2) how to document and present in a usable manner that can work in this digital age:

The colours themselves varied from worker to worker, batch to batch, plant to plant, country to country and age variation, so as we found with the correct engine grey, the "exact" colour is not so exact - range maybe but not exact. How do we present a correct colour blue for example when there could be a dozen physical examples of original blue that are all a bit different though genuinely original?

Ideally it would be great to have this all documented in a database so it could be searched and compared but we run into the variations in colour presentation caused by different computer monitors, not to mention people actually see the same colour differently. It's like trying to document original car smell - it's not easily definitive like a block casting number for example.

I've struggled with colour details having a Canadian car so think you are onto something with the importance of documenting this. I likely represent the younger end of this hobby and know that demographics are not working in our favour and in as little as a decade, sadly much information will be lost if we don't act now.

Gene is right.

Pinehurst green is the color you are looking for, paint# 246-50536. I have been told by a number of different people from different clubs that 1969 Volkswagen Delta green is a very close match. The original formula for Pinehurst green is: 4 7/8 oz of #246-0091 - White, 19 1/2 oz of #246-077 - Extra Dark Green, 3 1/2 oz of #246-063 - Orange, 4 1/8 oz of #246-020 - Black. These are Duco Tinting colors. I hope this helps.