[Mike K]

I think the official colour sample swatches should be looked upon as being what they were intended to be , that is " in the ball park " and nothing more than that. Unfortunately some of us being academic , we try to get down to the tiniest details .

The following are my own observations and I am hoping I am not offending anybody.

Reading through Mike Starmers research, for one particular colour , the early G3 or whatever it was , he matched a paint sample that was found inside the headlight shell of a motorcycle found in Belgium , the m/c was supposedly left behind by the BEF . He based his published results on that single example of paint found inside the headlight body . Going on from this, we are expected to believe, all of the BEF British vehicles finished in G3, were painted with the same brand of paint , and all of them had the same amount of matting agent as found in that headlight shell. It's total rubbish. It is ridiculous . It's a wild assumption and we should not be fooled. Mike Starmer should have added proviso's and made it clear to his readers that much of this colour research is, in the real world, an educated guess. The booklets I purchased from him have no proviso's anywhere , instead, you get the impression , this IS the correct colour and that's it , no arguments .

The matting agents added into the mix will have a big effect on the final colour to begin with. The paint factories weighed the colour pigments, OK that's fine, but did each brand of paint manufacturer buy their colour pigments from the same source.

The paint shops these days use computer scans to work out whats going on, even this technology doesn't rule out all possible variables . And why were the scanners installed in paint shops ?

The official vehicle colour guides are really just a " in the ball park " guide and we should be aware of this.