Touch up paint

What's the best source for touch up paint? Where do I find my paint code?

 

http://www.color-rite.com/

 

Good site but it only goes back to 86.

 

Yeah, and even searching other years gets me nothing for Yamaha for 1986 or 1988.

Perusing the XJ-CD shows me three different types of silver paint, Quartz Silver, Crystal Silver and Star Silver. The Crystal was only for the Turbo, I believe. The Quartz was on an XJ650 Seca, and the Star Silver was on a 550 Maxim, and 400 Seca. I guess that doesn't help a whole lot.

 

Well, it narrows it down to two out of three.... I'll check with my local Yamaha dealer. Thanks!

 

Just found another "Frost Silver" from a XJ650J owners manual supplement.

 

Actually, I wouldn't sweat finding the exact paint code, since the Yamaha dealer likely has no idea where to get touch up paint anyway. Take a removable part like a sidepanel and go to a reputable auto paint supplier. They likely have paint chips from hundreds of different cars there and will be able to match it up. I have worked at such a shop during the last two summers while in school. I have mixed paints for hundreds of different cars. If you have the exact code, you will get and exact match, but I have seen good paint people match chips by eye so close that you cannot tell the difference. Some paints are very tricky to mix, sometimes taking as little as 1/10th of a gram of some colors to get the match correctly. Others are simple, like Chrysler Kalapana black, which is simply a DuPont black paint. Some can have up to a dozen or more colors. GM white has both black and blue in it, if you can believe that. Silver is usually not a terribly difficult color to match, since it is usually made up of either a coarse aluminum, or fine aluminum, with some others to lighten or darken the tone, or give it a "hue" of some sort. Some DuPont dealers also have a process called ChromaVision, where a digital camera take several shots of the color to be matched, then checks it against a database of predetermined recipes to get a match. It works ok, but not a good as an experienced paint professional.