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Why you need choice of repairer insurance policy

RevNev

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I recently bought a genuine Holden ute pre-painted hard lid in Red Hot (Sting Red) and the paint didn't match the body colour, the hard lid had a brownish tint. To my surprise under Holden parts warranty, they agreed the colour was mismatched and they (Holden) sent me to a supposedly excellent panel shop with a PPG paint system to repaint the hard lid and remedy the colour mismatch. I use an awesome panel shop who are a manufacture approved repairers for a luxury car brand, but I had to use the panel shop being a parts warranty job that Holden chose.

Here's the job from this "excellent" panel shop who didn't remedy the colour mismatch, they mismatched the colour more than in was originally and made it worse. Instead of having a brownish tint, they repainted it a custom orange! This is what happens when your car ends up at a substandard repairer who can't match paint and do the job properly.

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Here's a close up, awesome job!! Imagine this mob doing an insurance job on the front guard, they'd be blending their "custom orange" down to the taillight, across the bonnet and ruin your car. Alternatively, I should have just taken it to my panel shop and paid them $1000 to fix it.

20210301_013814.jpg
 
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Chuckmeister

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I'm surprised they actually gave that back to you. Their excuse is probably because they painted the end caps to suit :p

Colour matching is definitely an art...I've sometimes spent an hour or more getting a colour right ('ve also had to respray mis-matches) ...but this unfortunately is colour blind.
 

RevNev

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I'm surprised they actually gave that back to you. Their excuse is probably because they painted the end caps to suit :p
The excuse was colour drift on plastic claiming if they'd painted steel the match would be perfect, so it's the plastic's fault. But they couldn't answer how the "plastic" mirror caps match and the "plastic" sail plane behind the turret. The painter had a PPG colour chip that appeared to match but obviously the blend he mixed up didn't.

Here's the mirror cap against it and looks like a match.

20210228_151802.jpg
 

Chuckmeister

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Red is a notorious colour for coverage...maybe he should have painted his red on a base colour of a darker primer or silver.
Theres 2 things with colour drift on plastic..1...I've never had that issue painting plastic and 2...there is no colour drift on something that has already been painted. If I've done a re-spray on a car, gone home and come back in the morning...should all the plastic parts on the car shifted 15 shades because they were plastic...BS.

Paint can dry a shade lighter or darker depending Hence blending...but that to me simply looks like a bad match/unskilled painter.

And regardless...fix the so called colour drift to match properly, it sticks out like dogs nuts and thats why people are called professionals. Could you imagine owning a 150k porsche or similar for a bumper repair and ending up accepting a colour mismatch like that...You'd laugh at him if he blamed the bumper. The business owner should stand up for his own quality control.
 

vc commodore

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I wouldn't have collected the car....However since you have it, take it back with a please fix properly....
 

Danric

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I've also had this problem with mine in the poison ivy green colour. Had the front bumper done, they had 2 goes at it and still a slightly different shade and same thing with the small panels around the back window. Same reason given as well as "this is a really difficult colour to match" which I don't understand. I thought having colour codes and computer colour matching systems was supposed to give an exact colour match.
 

Whiteshark68

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I've also had this problem with mine in the poison ivy green colour. Had the front bumper done, they had 2 goes at it and still a slightly different shade and same thing with the small panels around the back window. Same reason given as well as "this is a really difficult colour to match" which I don't understand. I thought having colour codes and computer colour matching systems was supposed to give an exact colour match.
I think the problem with poison ivy is that the original colour was produced in japan and the plant was wiped out in the whatever year it was tsunami
and some painters in australia just have no idea how to colour match.
 

losh1971

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It could be the red base brand. An old school panel beater told me white can be hard to match as he picked up on my bumperettes not being the same shade as my body, when he was looking at some work I had done elsewhere. But having said that I think it comes down to the brand of base as I have used a couple of different white bases on my ute and some match almost perfect and others don't. I also noticed it can vary depending on how much they mix. 500mls is never as close to the right shade as 1L is for some reason. At least in my experience anyway.
 

RevNev

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I wouldn't have collected the car....However since you have it, take it back with a please fix properly....
A good panel shop won't generally return a car that isn't right, they'll tend to take longer to finish the job and make excuses for why it took a week longer than expected, but that's ok if the job's mint. When they return a car that isn't right like this, I get the car out of there ASAP and add them to my "crap panel shop" list. If they try to give a poor quality job, they're no good, waste of time and generally incapable of getting it right.

I wouldn't use this panel shop by choice , but I was forced to use them to effect a Holden parts warranty job no different than an insurance company enforcing the use of their repairers.
 

EYY

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The missus recently had her car repaired at a ‘good’ shop around here, and the job was that bad that we sent it back straight away. Being a metallic orange, the front half of the car was very dull and had orange peel so rough you couldn’t even see a reflection.

You could see the primer over bonnet seals and inside the door gaps. They didn’t do any blending whatsoever and sprayed straight over some of the damage.

I actually returned the car to one of their other branches and and went over the car with the manager. Because they had done such a poor job and ruined any chance they had at blending through the panels adjoining the damaged panels, they actually resprayed the entire car apart from the rear bumper, tailgate and roof.

When we received it back the second time, the finish was incredible, attention to detail was great and they had even filled the small shopping centre dents.

Sometimes you get lucky. But certainly helps your chances if you approach them with a level head.
 
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