Looking for a painting solution to finish off repairs nicely. I have to date just been using pressure packs cans off the Bunnings shelf but I would like to get more accurate colour matching in the future so the repairs become almost invisible.

I was thinking of a airbrush set up and a selection of base colours so that I can mix up the desired colour myself but I am not sure where to start with the type of paint and a supplier that can deal with small quantities of a range of colours

Any ideas or experience with what does or doesn't work

Any good paint shop that the car guys go to will be able to eye match for you in 2K or acrylic. Look for where the petrolheads go and hopefully is run by a guy who used to paint cars for a living.
I only use 2K as doing professional repairs I'd rather have the durability on nose n rails so it still looks good in a year or two.
Also, 2K cures much faster so in summer I can have it handled in a couple of hours and on the water / dragged around on sand the next day. But it is seriously toxic crap so you need to be sensible.....
For the latter reason many choose acrylic.


It is really hard to match, after about 30 or 40 times watching and listening to the paint shop guy I reckon I could do maybe 20% of the jobs myself. That's in really basic colours.
The issue we have is with Australian paint systems they don't have the right tinters to do many of the overseas colours. The brightness of the blue and orange used by Cobra for example. The fluoro orange used on JP and Starboard a couple of years back simply can't be matched so you need a really good paint guy, and paint it over white base, and a long fade out distance (or fade it out around a logo so its less obvious).
No way will you match by yourself without a lot of practice and at least 20 tint colours at home. Even then some just can't be matched.

Thus - pay the man. $25 for 200mL of a match that will be right saves a lot of heartache lol.

Then your leftover dribbles will enable you to modify other base colours and have a play with matching.

But when you look at a white (apparently), but add grey and green and then get it spot on and you knew that sh!t - you will be proud of yourself and tell everyone.

As to airbrush- takes a bit too long.
Get an HVLP gun with a 0.8 or 1mm tip - you can dial it down to about a 10mm dia spray pattern with virtually no fluid flow or up to a fan wide enough to spray a rail.
The $25 ones eBay actually do just fine, just only last maybe 10 jobs.

+1 for the bright dayglo colours. Definately need to be over a white base coat. The thinner the colour coat the more jump it has. Hard to get it just right.

cheers- sounds like good advice

I do a fair bit of repairs here in Sweden. Colormatch isn't easy but there are ways to make it easier. By using a good colorchart (I use a NCS and a RAL) you can find a close match, then you can look up what the colorcode is in for example RGB or CMYK (link www.e-paint.co.uk/Lab_values.asp). This will give you an idea of what colors to mix (you need to understand the basic of the colorsystem of course). I only use 2K carpaint and normaly a few base colors (Black, white, Blue, green, red, yellow etc.)takes you a long way. Make sure you got a pure raw white since almost all white are tinted in some way. Problem is to mix small amounts, easy to get to much of one or the other color and have to start over. Reading some car painting manuals could be good if you are new to sprayguns. Quite a lot of things can go wrong (contamination, water in compressor etc.). Besides that I agree with Mark.

Thanks BjornD I think I will follow Marks advice and get some pots mixed up, four of us race weekly in the family so we seem to have a steady stream of repairs between us but I could probably get away with just getting a few pots of colours mixed up for me as its only a few boards that are the same colours that I need every time.

I do have a decent spray gun set up already, but that does seem like a lot of work to set up and then clean up just to paint an area that will be done with a couple of swings of the gun.

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cammd said..
Thanks BjornD I think I will follow Marks advice and get some pots mixed up, four of us race weekly in the family so we seem to have a steady stream of repairs between us but I could probably get away with just getting a few pots of colours mixed up for me as its only a few boards that are the same colours that I need every time.

I do have a decent spray gun set up already, but that does seem like a lot of work to set up and then clean up just to paint an area that will be done with a couple of swings of the gun.

Cam,
if you have the colour code Supercheap can mix a small pot or spray can up for you.