A Yellow Shade of Discord

As described in whatever previous post, an issue with the paint job led to some further delay in the repairs. This was not helped by the yearly holidays of every party involved, including me. 

At some point in July the car was nearing completion, but the result in broad daylight was quite not up to expectations. The bonnet was clearly an other shade of yellow than the rest.

We thought UV aging might have played a role in this, so we removed a black stripe from the original bonnet to confirm. It didn't. There was no difference at all. 

The issue was honestly harder to spot with the artificial lightning of the House of Speed workshop.

Long story short both bonnets were sent back to the paint shop which in turn sent the dented one to PPG for analysis. It came back to the car body shop with a written note that said "That's going to cost a lot".

I have been shown the bill in their lab area : they had to prepare a batch of at least 800 ml of my colour, which is mostly yellow with a bit of red and some drops of black. Sourcing an extra liter of yellow did cost them 300€ or thereabouts.

Before trying anything fancy, they prepared a new batch of the same paint, and compared the result of applying 4 layers to a pair of swatches : one prepared with your usual neutral grey primer, the other with a white primer.

And behold the result here on the picture, the one with the white primer gives the expected vibrant and rich colour. 

With that conclusive test, the bonnet got its final paint job and now matches the car closely. 

It's not perfect and never will be : the result is a bit darker than the top of the scuttle, but lighter than the sides...  I don't know what witchcraft is involved or what effect age had on the paint. I can just confirm that the colour has faded on the top of the scuttle compared to what is hidden under the bonnet. So there's that.

'Yellow is the most difficult colour', my friend who's in the business told me.