robertmacdowell wrote:
I see red every time somebody talks about "paint codes" and here's why. They are based on particular pigments from particular manufacturing processes. When those pigments go out of style, the entire color specification system goes down the toilet. Pantone 300 is not eternal. I laugh when I see nations specify their flags in it. What is eternal is the Munsell system or CIELAB because it is derived from absolutes. It's not a brand like Pantone, it's a unit of measure like Watt.
Lets define what we mean by "codes". I assume the term means the catalog or stock number, not the actual mixing formula. The formula is indeed worthless, because the standard mixing bases have changed.
When Mr. Rust was still around, and you made an inquiry about Duco 254-34460, which happened to be the body color the Soo Line specified on their diesel locomotives in 1948, he would pull the original drift card and then tell you, "We haven't made this in a while, we'll have to match it." No problem about different pigments and the like, because they had preserved a specimen of the actual paint, stored under ideal conditions. Yes, they would have to reproduce it using the current pigments, and yes, it might be a less than perfect "industrial" match, but it traced back directly to a sample of the original color.
At one time, back in the eighties, Mr. Rust sent me partial drift cards, with the comments that these were only half size because they were running low on them.
When I contacted Dupont six or seven years ago with additional Dulux codes for the maroon the road used on it's passenger equipment, with the purpose to see how much it might have differed from the locomotive color, and in what way, is when I was told the drift cards did not exist. I donno, maybe they do, but without a sale of mega gallons of paint in the offing, I didn't have much horse power to push the issue, so didn't. That was when the nice helpful lady offered the codes (but no samples) of the modern formulations, but could offer no insight a to what they had been matched to. I would have thought that if they had been matched to an older version of a color in their line, that it would have been noted, so I assume they were matched to a customer supplied sample.
In a way, I don't blame them. Modern computer matching takes a lot of the drudgery out of color matching, and if no one has ordered a color in forty years, there is not much need to provide a perfect match.
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