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I have used black paint and 2K glossy clear coat to spray paint some parts of my car. I was wondering though, that my paint is not exactly the same as other parts of the car. It is "shiny", because of the glossy 2K clear coat. But it's missing something...

My paint looks like this:

my paint

Original paint:

original paint

What are those tiny little shiny things in the original paint?

2 Answers 2

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The tiny shining things in the original paint are metal particles, which is why it is called metallic paint.

I guess you should have bought a duplicate of the original paint spec. Anyway, it's notoriously difficult to get an exact paint match, which is why even the experts want to repaint a whole panel.

But even then, in some lighting conditions you may be able tell the difference. I bought a car on a dry day that was parked in full sun. I eyed up the panels and the paintwork, but it was a full two weeks after buying, at twilight, that I noticed a colour mismatch on a resprayed door.

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While the first answer is good, it is somewhat wrong. If the area repaired is small enough, we will opt to blend the color into the rest of the panel and then clear coat the entire panel. However if the repair is to large (repair consumes most of the panel) then doing as mentioned above will only result in a "butt match" mismatch-very noticeable. The correct solution is to paint the entire panel and blend into the adjacent panel and fade into the original color and clear coat both entire panels. This lets the mismatch color slowly fade away making it much less noticeable.

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  • Welcome to Motor Vehicle Maintenance & Repair! We're glad you're here to participate. Commented Apr 15 at 14:01
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    When my wife's vehicle needed warranty paint work due to an inch long scrape/delamination of paint on the absolute edge of the bumper at the tail light they told us flat out that they'd end up redoing half the bumper just to get the blending correct. The area of the work was 3000% larger than the damaged area.
    – Logarr
    Commented Apr 15 at 16:54
  • Consider a pearl color which a little dent can require the whole car needs to be repainted because a pearl color match may be impossible Commented May 3 at 19:12
  • Cadillac 1st pearl color was this way Commented May 3 at 19:13

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