Top coat paint

[RKlemm]

I have a 87 E32. I refitted all my electronics from Raymarine to B&G.
Reglassed, primed and now paint. The question is how do I match the existing paint color? I'm not interested in painting the entire deck. Any suggestions on what the color ID is?

 

[ConchyDug]

Take a sample to Sherwin Williams and they can match, that machine will get it a lot closer than eyeballing it. I've done this for aircraft paint and it worked.

 

[Christian Williams]

It's gelcoat, right? Maybe you could take a lazarette hatch to be scanned.

For my transom, I got color cards from Awlgrip. It took a few days of holding the samples against the (faded) gelcoat in various lights to make the guess as to which came closest. Morning, evening,, cloudy, sunny --conditions boggle the eye. We do the best we can.

It has to be the color chart provided by the paint manufacturer, a color printout from a computer, or even a laptop display of colors, is not accurate.

 

[Loren Beach]

It's gelcoat, right? Maybe you could take a lazarette hatch to be scanned.

When we were deciding on our hull color, in 2021, the painter needed to know exactly/accurately what the OEM color was (or had become, over the years) so he quickly machine-buffed a cutout that I had preserved from the time I added another port. That surface brightened up considerably to a "newish" look. We finally decided, after studying the Awegrip book, on a similar color -- not the same, tho.

It was interesting to see how the original EY gel coat could look with a thorough buffing.

I guess that main take-away is that the hatch surface you scan needs to have all surface fading/grunge cleaned off.