Full Text of the Austin-Healey Colour Guide
Full text of the Austin-Healey Color Guide appears below and includes information about the project, specifics about the Guide itself, a brief discussion of color matching, and some background about the automotive paint business. The sample images of the color pages are added here for convenience and are separate full-size pages in the actual Guide.
Introduction
This book is the first in a series of visual guides to postwar British car colors. The series will ultimately include Jaguar, Austin-Healey, MG, and Triumph marques from approximately the mid 1930’s to the early 1970’s.I have two main goals for the color guides. First, and perhaps stating the obvious, I want the guides to be comprehensive, accurate visual representations of historic British car colors. Second, it is important to me that the guides are useful, not just an academic exercise. With these two goals in mind, I have produced a well- researched guide to the colors of some of the greatest cars ever produced.
The colors in this guide are accurate matches of sprayouts I did of ICI “2K” single layer urethane automotive paint. I determined the proper paint codes from a variety of sources and received assurances from ICI that the colors were matched to original standards. My firsthand comparisons bear this out, but I have compared only a very limited number of my sprayouts to originals, and acceptance of the accuracy of all the colors requires some faith in ICI’s color matches. The colors in this book are what I consider the best compromise between a custom color match of original paint and a color from an unrelated late model vehicle that happens to be “close” to the original.
The colors are organized in two different ways. To make the guide easier to use, I have included a page of standard colors for each model so that all the colors for that model are viewable at a glance. All the colors are also organized alphabetically by name in a separate section with five large colors per page and a bleed on the right so that direct color comparisons can be easily made.
A current paint code is given for every color so that owners and restorers can buy a state of the art automotive paint without sacrificing the character of the original color. I also made a conscious effort to include more rather than less. While this can be confusing, I felt that the benefit of completeness outweighed the potential for confusion.
When I encountered unresolvable discrepancies in which of two colors with the same name was correct, I included both with a note of explanation. I also included all the documented variations to standard colors. Variations are explained in the Technical Background section. Occasionally the color name in the ICI Color Register differs from the name by which that color is commonly known. In such cases, I have chosen to use the common name and include the official ICI name parenthetically.
The guides are by no means the last word in a field where new information is continually being brought to the fore, particularly with regards to color availability for specific models or rare colors like Jaguar’s Twilight Blue. That said, I do believe that the guides fill an important void in the British car literature and deserve a place on your bookshelf. I welcome any comments or criticisms of the book so that improvements can be made in any future editions.
Thank you for your support by purchasing this guide.
Don Pikovnik
March, 1999
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Technical Background
There is much mystique associated with the subject of vintage automobile paint colors. In my opinion, this is due primarily to the lack of a reliable visual reference to those colors. The subject of color and color matching is not easily quantifiable and without a visual reference color defies an accurate description. This section will explain how the guide was produced and in doing so I hope to dispel some of the mystery surrounding vintage automobile colors.Overview
My father and I run a business that manufactures color cards using a method
called color depositing. In this process, color-matched lacquer is applied
directly to a sheet of paper using a special die mounted in a hydraulic press.
Using color depositing, we are able to portray color with accuracy and
consistency unsurpassed by any other production method. The color pages in
this book were produced this way.
There are other ways to produce a color card including operations such as “chipping” and “striping”. In chipping, a sheet of paper is either spray or roll-coated with color-matched lacquer and cut into small “chips” which are then glued to a substrate stock. Most old chip books were produced this way, and the method still finds application today. Striping is an operation used primarily for high volume production of the “letdowns” typically seen in a paint or hardware store paint display rack. In this operation, a series of stripes of color-matched lacquer is applied to a continuous roll of paper by doctor blades, the paper is dried in an oven, and the swatches are cut to width.
No matter which method of production is used, a color card is a portrayal of color using lacquer as a coating medium. While it is certainly possible to coat paper with actual automotive paint or any other coating for that matter, the cost of such a project would be astronomical. I am unaware of actual product being used for anything other than a small quantity of samples, usually for establishing color standards.
The book of many colors
Before establishing color standards, it was first necessary to assemble a list of color names and proper paint codes for each of the models I intended to cover. My primary references were “The Original” series of books and photocopied color lists compiled by an ICI employee named Alan Mayhew. I also used photocopies of miscellaneous chip charts and catalogs to cross check the primary sources. The information was not without some discrepancies, but most of these were resolved to my satisfaction. I have over four hundred colors in my database covering four manufacturers.
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Color standards
The colors in this book are color-matched lacquer, not actual automotive paint. This is an important distinction in that the accuracy of the color portrayal is directly dependent on the accuracy of the color match. Taking this one step further, the accuracy of the color match can be no better than the accuracy of the standard being matched.
The establishment of accurate color standards for this book was a major undertaking, and it is also the greatest source of potential controversy because not everyone will agree that the colors in this book are "correct". So what is "correct" when it comes to color?
It may seem obvious, but the correct color is the OEM color standard "sprayout" that the factory approved at the time the cars were built. Unfortunately, that color, as approved, no longer exists, and even if the original standard could be located, the color would not be identical due to the age of the sample. We are therefore forced to use a proxy for the original standard.
There are several alternatives when choosing a proxy: locate vehicles with well-preserved samples of original paint, use an original mixing formula from a paint company, or use a period "color chip book". In each case we must assume the color is a correct match to the original approved standard, a color that no longer exists. Let's examine each of these three alternatives a little more.
Matching colors of cars with original paint is a technique often used by professional restorers, and their attention to detail is admirable. A good custom color match is the only way to assure that the car is the same color as the sample. But, even with an excellent match to an original sample, does that mean that all cars leaving the factory painted that color will match? Does it mean that the sample on that particular car matches the OEM sprayout color standard? The answer is no.
Using original mixing formulas is also a commonly used technique, and paint companies will generally dismiss the notion that their formulas may not match reality when it comes to our small part of the paint universe. This is not meant as a criticism and is perfectly understandable from the paint company's point of view. After all, a major paint company will have literally tens or even hundreds of thousands of colors in their database. The entire Austin-Healey production used less than sixty colors.
To understand how color mismatches can occur using original formulas, it helps to know how automobile manufacturers and paint companies work together to establish a color line. In a perfect world, this is how it should work: a car manufacturer chooses a company to supply paint on an OEM basis; the factory then sprays sample panels of the approved OEM paint and distributes the panels to non-OEM paint companies for use as color standards; the non-OEM companies then match those color standards perfectly and everyone's colors will match. In reality things are not quite that simple.
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Not all paint companies have relationships with all auto manufacturers. This can result in a paint company not even receiving color standards to match. Even with color standards, the pigments one company uses may not be exactly the same as those used by the OEM company, and this can lead to poor color matches. In the special case of historic colors, the color standards, if they exist, are quite old and many of the original pigments used to make the color are no longer available, making color matching doubly difficult. About the best we can hope for then is that our paint company can produce a well-preserved, original color standard which can be compared to our modern mix of the color.
The last choice we have for a proxy of an original color standard is a period color chip book. In my experience, this is the least desirable of the three alternatives we have identified. I base this conclusion on the fact that we do not know what color standard was used to match the chip book colors, nor is it possible to determine the accuracy of the match. In fact, I would be surprised to find two color chip books in which the colors in one matched the colors in the other.
In light of all of this, I chose to establish color standards by mixing and spraying ICI "2K" urethane paint onto metal sample panels. We made a company investment in the ICI mixing basics and can mix and spray any color in the ICI database. ICI has modern mixing formulas for all the colors in this book and can produce original color standards for comparison purposes. As I mentioned in the Introduction, the handful of color comparisons I have done between my sprayouts and the original standards were favorable.
The obvious benefit to an owner or restorer is that all the colors in this book are readily available from a local ICI supplier. It was very important to me in preparing this book to provide information that would enable owners to buy correct paint "off the shelf."
My choice of ICI products was based on the availability of the colors I needed and their positive response to my project in its early stages. I have received no financial or other incentive from ICI and can recommend you consider using their products based entirely on my personal experience with them.
Match Categories and Variations
ICI assigns a match category for each paint code. This is a qualitative evaluation of how well the mixed color matches the color standard. These codes appear next to the large colors in this book and are explained in the Notes to the Color Database section.
ICI adds variations to standard colors when a significant color discrepancy from the standard is identified on vehicles in the field. Both the color error and number of vehicles found to be in error would determine the significance of the discrepancy. In such a case, ICI reformulates the standard color to match reality, and assigns a new paint code to that name. Pale Primrose (ICI-3297 std) is an example of a color with a red variation (6974) and a dark variation (WH13), both of which were identified after the vehicle left the factory. Production color error is addressed later in this section.
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Color Matching
Without being overly technical, I would like to briefly explain what is involved in color matching and why color can be so difficult to control in a large scale production environment like automobile manufacturing. Color is the perception of the human eye to the way an object interacts with light. Visible light is the part of the electro-magnetic spectrum comprised of wavelengths from 400 nanometers (blue/violet) to 700 nanometers (red). An object that reflects primarily longer wavelengths and absorbs primarily shorter is perceived as “red”. A plot of how much incident light is reflected at each wavelength is called a spectral reflectance curve. The curve can vary depending on the angle of view and the incident light source. Reflectance curves of Signal Red (ICI 6200) and British Racing Green (ICI 8120) are shown in the Appendix.
Color matching is the art of mixing different pigments, each with their own reflectance curve, in proper proportion so that the resulting reflectance curve matches that of a standard. Theoretically, a perfect match is possible, however, in practice some deviation of the synthesized curve from the standard is accepted. This deviation is called the error of the match and makes the match look “cleaner”, “dirtier”, “redder”, etc. Occasionally, the match will look acceptable under one type of lighting condition and poor under another. This is termed a “metameric match” and results when the synthesized curve matches the standard well in one part of the spectrum and poorly in another. This is generally not a commercially acceptable color match, however, at times it is unavoidable with a given selection of pigments.
The point of this discussion is to illustrate that the error of a color match is a fact of life and a matter of degree. A good color match has less deviation from the standard than a poor one but in my opinion it is incorrect to evaluate a color match without allowing for error. For a more complete discussion of color and its measurement, please refer to the References section.
Color in production
Color consistency is extremely difficult to maintain in any large scale manufacturing operation such as an automobile factory. It is my belief that if one were to make a direct side by side comparison of two random vehicles that were painted the same color, there would be a perceptible difference in color.
There are many sources of color error in production. Production conditions and batch to batch paint inconsistency are most significant. In times gone by, colors were sometimes adjusted on the fly by automobile manufacturers operating under time and production constraints so that the paint company might be asked to make some color adjustments and ship the product without changing the name or paint code. This results in two shades (or more) of a color with the same name and paint code.
The fact that color errors exist on production vehicles is not cause for despair. This is life in the real world and, in my opinion, actually adds to the appeal of postwar British cars. Please view the colors in this guide for what they are: accurate portrayals of the sprayouts I made from ICI mixing formulas, not necessarily an exact match to any one vehicle.