Ding repair question about color under gloss coat? How to match?

In exchange for a million dollars, I am doing a ding repair for a friend.  I have patched in some PU foam on the rail and filled in a bit with spackle and am about ready to glass.  I’d really like to match the color with some rattle can or other.  But the color seems to be under the gloss and over at least the lam, if not the hot coat.  You can see where I was able to sand the color  off as prep’d it for latter glassing.  I have just about no experience with PU and PE and how they are colored.  Would someone please tell me how this color was done and maybe offer some idea of how to match the color?  Many thanks.

Hi Greg,

If you sanded through the paint before hitting any weave there’s a good chance it was sprayed after the hot/fill coat then cleared with Pro-tec or similar. Just looking at your piccy that looks like the case with your project.

If it is the case, sand back your filler like normal to finished repair to about 400 wet & dry, match the colour and mask up and spray and clear and finish sand or polish.

Now, colour matching. This is not a simple subject and takes a lot of practice to but with a bit of a system you can get really close even on your first time.

The best thing to do is find a colour wheel, even a basic one but with at least the secondary colours.

The trick to colour matching is finding the right hue (colour) so in your case it’s an orange/yellow(?) so you would be looking at an orange to start with. Look at your colour wheel and see if the colour is warmer than orange or cooler (i.e. more red or more yellow). There is a brown tinge jugding from your photo so a bit of dark blue (like a drop or two) to ‘darken’ the orange may help. But I’m getting ahead of myself a bit so back on track.

Ok, you have found the right (or close as possible, basically a simple orange) hue and you mixed it up. Now, is it a bright orange or a dull orange or ‘really’ strong orange or not?
The trick to change this is to use the colour directly ‘opposite’ on the colour wheel (called the complementary colour). What this does is neutralise the colour, in theory if you did this exactly in equal parts you would create grey, this goes for all colours!

Remember I mentioned blue before? it’s on the other side of the colour wheel but this is what you need to experiment with and try to NOT use black! it will take all the life out of your colour, use the darkest blue/green/purples depending on which way the colour needs to go, i.e. warmer or cooler remembering that reds are warm and greens are cool (yellow and blue, the opposite of red :wink: ). Because you are not using the ‘exact’ complementary colour you will create a different colour (this is the brown tinge you want).

This is a tough subject to explain in a short post but just keep in mind that you are ‘pushing’ the colour around the colour wheel either way to get the right hue, then you can push the colour in/out of the wheel using the complementary or opposite colour to change the contrast and tweak the hue.

The colour wheel is 3 dimensional so the other dimension is black and white or up and down the wheel. As i mentioned before though, be very careful using straight black and use white to ‘lighten’ your colour or take it back a peg so you can ‘push’ it around a bit more to perfect your hue.

Ok, the colour looks close, now spray a test patch and let it dry completely, colour changes quite a bit from wet to dry, again this takes a bit of tweaking. Cut yourself some strips of good paper, spray the end of a piece and let it dry then using it like a colour swatch, sit it against the existing colour to see how it looks. Rinse and repeat unitll you are happy with the colour and then finish your job.

After doing this only a few times keeping the colour wheel and how it works in mind you will find it surprisingly simple to match colours and you will soon be able to see what colours you need and get it right very quickly.

Apart from browns, purples and skin tones (which use a lot of one or two primarys in most cases or are hard to mix properly given just primary colours) you will find you can get by with a very limited range of basic colours and save yourself a lot of money and waste less paint!
In fact, for any colour you mix always make sure you mix more than you need, even twice as much as you will find that it will be pretty close to another you may need on your next repair (especially for ‘yellowing’ boards :wink: ) and in no time you will have a good palette of colours at no extra cost.

Hope that gets you started and let us know how you get on, cheers.

Mick.

 

color over the hotcoat and under the gloss...hmm... looks like some sort of acrylic spray. If it were me, I'd try to match it with my less than perfect artistic ability:)

I'd probably just rattle can it and do several layers of Krylon crystal clear gloss over it. let it dry...then scuff it up with a green scotchbrite pad.don't know if that's the best solution though.

are you sure it has a gloss coat and not just a clear spray or wipe on?

*edit: Whoops. looks like someone got on it before me. good luck

Mick, that was a very nice dissertation on mxing/matching colors. Quite informative. Thanks Heaps.

[quote="$1"]

In exchange for a million dollars, I am doing a ding repair for a friend... [/quote]

you're not charging enough

…matching is the last problem; main problem is to does a gloss coat on top. You talk about spray coat; no way you can match a gloss coat with a sprayed one.

Second problem is the color matched, after resin is applied, will be darker.

Other problem is that there s no fine way to mimic foam paint on the hot coat; yes, this is not the case, so this case is easier.

Another problem, is that I never see fine adhesion with an acrylic color on the resin.

 

–You should do the gloss coat at least 2 times bigger than the sprayed area; if not after the rub out you ll notice that you sanded the “shade” (fades) of the color and now you have a delimited area

 

 

You sure its a gloss coat and not whipe or spray on acrilic? I had a ding like that recently that made me crazy.

Mick, what a great epistle.  I’ve printed and saved it.  Thanks so much.

Huck, I think you know the problem.  We tell them we don’t do ding repairs, they laugh and say “…but you’re a  shaper, of course you do ding repairs.”    We say no we don’t, but they bring them by anyway and drop them off and just laugh like they think we are kidding or just holding out for more money.  So I told him you can 't afford me.  He said charge whatever you want.    I will probably settle for 200.   Or I might be keeping the board.  We’ll see.

Reverb, Girvin, thanks, but I really don’t know what it is.  I just know that it is sprayed and the finish is glossy.  I think I will glass it normally and then spray rattle can color and then automotive clear and hope it doesn’t kurdle.

Somebody ought to start a running thread on ding repairs.  Just not me.

Thanks Greg and tblank, hope you get some milage out of it.

Greg,

after hearing the background on the story I’d just do the repair and let them worry about the paint. If you use rattle can and auto acrylic clear you will have problems for sure, not worth your hassle unless you have auto type acrylics available for the colour.