The Stovebolt Site Forums The Shop Area Paint and Body Shop 47-53 grey/silver interior, dash, door paint....jim carter brown?

The binders are different resins, the pigments are chemically different, the metal flake is
a different material, and the reducers are different now a days due to the use of
hardeners and catalysts. All of the individual components that make up paint are
compounds of many different materials. Each individual chemical in the compound will
age differently as they outgas and oxidize over time. All of the materials making up
paints today are of a completely different generation than those of a half century or
more in the past.
For those reasons you will never be able to come up with a ‘perfect’ match. Even
pristine original paint that has been hidden from the sun and weather will have changed
by merely being exposed to the atmosphere for 50, 60 or 70 years. Some of the
components that make up the pigment could be faded to a lighter color or some darker,
some of the resins could have darkened, some of the metal flake will be oxidized
possibly making it lighter or darker depending on the alloy used.
In other words, it’s impossible to say exactly what the original color was. The best we
can do is find something that looks correct to the eye. PPG has offsets that are close to
the original AD interior color, and on the less expensive side, the Rustoleum 7272 that
some of the guys have been using is a good alternative.
It’s been so long since any of us have sat behind the wheel of an original painted dash
in our daily driver because of the plastic padded safety dash of today, that we’ve
forgotten that the interiors of yesterday’s vehicles were in fact, painted with a gloss
paint. I can remember vividly waxing all of the dash boards and garnish moldings in all
of the vehicles that I owned ranging from the ’34 Studebaker, to the ’41 Caddy to the
many cars thru the 50’s and 60’s. I can’t remember one that was ever finished with flat
paint!

DG