anyone familiar with automotive body repair?

Metallics are hard to match. They may match the paint to the paint code but the colors out of the factory with vary slightly with each drum of paint and from the first batch from the drum down to the last. I know a high end body shop in the area that has 8 diffrent shades of silver that goes on this guys BMW, you could never tell looking at the car till you actualy take a sample from one area and look at it on another area. The guys wife is a bad driver and they have too much money. My family had the same problem with our '99 camry which I got rear ended in the paint did not match the color of the car but did match the paint code, it was a metallic champange color.

 

I don't know...I've had areas on cars repaired before and if the paint guy is any good, they do a real good job of "blending" the new color with the existing color. If the right guy does the job you'll never see any difference in color from the original to the repair.

 

I find it strange that blending is necessary, if you had walked into a paint shop with no insurance involved... they would quote you for a job that would be the whole panel or door or bumper being painted, usually 250$ per panel, they paint a fender or a door, not a section of it, just sayin

 

Most shops can't match paint. They go by a formula for the paint code and every paint batch needs to be "tweaked" to get it to match the original hue exactly. It takes a painter with a very good/trained eye to be able to know what to add to get the desired results. There are very few of them that actually possess this skill/art. With metallics, the job becomes even more complicated due to how the light hits the metallic flakes under different light angles in addition to the paint pigment.

Don't want to be a downer, but I have never been satisfied with any panel that has been repainted, though I am very picky due to my years spent working in a paint shop during high school/college. Watch out for blend jobs... they usually expand the painted sections so when you go back and look at the car, you will usually look only at the panel that was damaged when they in fact painted the adjacent panels so you will think the repaired panel matches the surrounding paint.

If you're not satisfied with the job, don't accept it and have a talk with your insurance about possibly using a more competent paint shop/repair facility.

GL... accidents are a real PITA to deal with.

 

A good body shop will blend all paint jobs as it is a way to gradually go from factory finish to the repaired section. A gradual diffenence is harder to recognize and wont stick out like a sore thumb. Especially in an older car where the sun has faded the paint. Mixing a paint to match should be much easier now with laser color analyzers but perfection is still evasive. One thing to look for in your repair is orange peel effect where you see bumps or ridges in the finish. Most bodyshops only apply 1 or 2 coats of base and hardly ever do any sanding between coats as this would be to costly. Toyota has a better finish than Dodge or Gm and less orange peel effect so make sure the finish texture looks similar to the rest of the car and don't compare to a panel next to the repair if it is a fender look at the opposite fender any differences could reduce the trade in value or even be a deduction of value in event of an insurance total loss.