paint code

[sprogg7]

could anyone help me find the paint code for my elan. i have checked the plate in the engine bay but it does not show the code.
the car is a 1990 se and is red, i have been told their are 2 or 3 different reds used at that age. any ideas?
cheers sprogg 7

[Fredjohn]

Check out WikiLEC under Paint Colour Codes

[Fourdoorcat]

If you are looking for touch up paint, good luck. I struck out in a couple of attempts to obtain Mustard Yellow. The best advice I got (but I have yet to do this) is to find a local auto body shop that does repairs and matches paint. Ask them to match your paint and buy the minimum amount of paint from them. That should keep you in touch up paint for a very long time.

If...I mean when I do this, I'll post the outcome. It sounds like a logical approach.

Ken

[sprogg7]

thanks guy...i'm trying to get a can of paint from my local halfords but they don'y seem to be able to match their three "reds" with the wikilec codes.
but thanks for the info i print out the page and try again
cheers sprogg

[Rice crispy]

Sprogg don't know where you are but my local paint shop matches paint and can provide spray cans of it I'm in Brentwood ESSES

David

[GoM100Go]

These people found my perfect red. A23, mustard yellow is the only one listed, a call to them gets you what you need...

http://www.automotivetouchup.com/paint-codes/lotus.htm

[Fourdoorcat]

Thanks for the lead, GoM100Go,

I ordered the small bottle of Norfolk Mustard; I'll post later and let everyone know how it goes. The first attempt (from the other online guys) was a bust.

Ken

[sprogg7]

thanks guys. i managed to get a spray can of the correct red (hopefully). when it stop being so cold i'll give it ago, thanks for all your advice

[Fourdoorcat]

Sorry it took me so long to get back to this.

I went to the http://www.automotivetouchup.com site and purchased a small bottle of their Norfolk Mustard. Strangely, it looked like the same bottle I had previously purchased elsewhere on line that didn't match very well.

The good news was that this one was a little better. The bad news is that it's still not right. I have a suspicion that there is some operation somewhere that makes these little bottles of paint and supplies them to various on-line retailers. Could be that the deviation I noticed between the first bottle, the second and what it should really be are actually indicators of their inability to match colors and their lack of success at quality control.

Fortunately (or not) some knucklehead traded paint with my wife recently, so our 2008 Ford Escape has to go to the shop for a minor repair. This will put me in the very same room with a guy who can recommend a source to match my paint.

More to come....

Ken

[Jeemy]

Most little local paint shops should be able to match paint very exactly. This is 100% your best option with older paints.

The best way to get them to do this is successfully to literally remove a wing mirror and take it to them (smallest panel I can think of on the Elan thats easily removable - rear spoiler?).

I use a company called Edinburgh Refinishing Services and they've matched a very difficult Hi-D orange, and various faded and exclusive paint finishes for me. But they couldn't do it if I took the vehicle there. They tried the orange 3 times. But when I took off a runner rail and left it with them, they matched it perfectly. And I got enough to cover the entire vehicle twice over for another £40, meaning I have spare forever of the exact colour.

Because I think all Elan paints, being 'soft', will fade & oxidise over time, and this will obviously vary with degrees. So its not as if you can buy a bottle of 'correct' or 'original' Elan Norfolk Mustard and it will be the same as your car. You would find I think if you parked two NMY cars side-by-side, they were visibly different. Lotus would be buying paint in batches and these might also vary very slightly. But as long as the whole car got one batch, that would look fine.

This will be why its hard to match. Giving a local guy the part so they can test the paint in situ and wait for it to dry means that in only 5-10 minutes of their time, spread out over a few days, they can really get a good match. And it will cost under £10 per aerosol.

I would guess you could post parts to ERS and they'd post you paint. They put it in an aerosol or supply as 2-pack and I could even collect if they aren't prepared to post. They are brilliant and I am sure most local bodyshop suppliers would be exactly the same.

The other place that is really good in terms of quality is paints4u.com - I got put onto them by detailing contemporaries and for 'hard' non-fade modern paints they supply really good quality touch-up paints.

Halfrauds paint is utterly awful both from experience and reputation - steer away.

I have a little bottle of Calypso Red touch-up from SJs, which I have not tried - I was intending on using this over small fibreglass repairs to the interior of the engine bay. I have no confidence at all that it will match up but at least inside the engine bay there is less fade, and its mainly corners or only a short distance to blend it out to an edge.

[Brit-Car-Nut]

Gas filler door?

[Peter_W]

I needed some touch-up paint for an MBG GT that was re-sprayed at some point in it's history before I bought it with a non-MG paint. I took it to an auto parts store that sold paint and they used the method as described in the link below – it was a perfect match.

Car Craft -Paint Matching Guide - Match Mystery Paint Perfectly

“It's based on a Minolta digital spectrometer, which works something like a camera, but instead of producing an image, it analyzes the hues in the sample and produces a readout of color codes. The information from the spectrometer is fed it into a computer database of factory paint codes; sometimes the readout pinpoints the color, sometimes it gives several choices.”