Painting Boyco Oil Water and Gas cans

[WorldChamp1914]

Hi guys…..what is the best paint match to paint them red, blue and white……what paint products give the best results? Any paint code numbers?…Thanks.

[TRDxB2]

Hi guys…..what is the best paint match to paint them red, blue and white……what paint products give the best results? Any paint code numbers?…Thanks.

Here it is https://www.mtfca.com/discus/messages/3 ... 1385875017

colors ad.jpg (51.09 KiB) Viewed 933 times

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looks like original colors https://www.mecum.com/lots/1090259/boy- ... d-can-set/

OIP.jpg (23.84 KiB) Viewed 933 times

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another true blue

[Tod Wirth, WI]

Gary,

I have a set of Boyco cans with a fare amount of paint still on them.

I set about trying to come up with some matching paint codes. I went to a local PPG automotive paint supply company trying to come up with a best match. They first tried to read the paint with there color spectrometer and mixed up what came up as the best match. It worked well for the off white can, but failed on the other two cans. After multiple more trips and spending a good deal of time going through books and books of paint chips, this was the best I could come up with without having custom paint mixed up for them. I could have gone the route of having custom paint mixed, but as part of the project I was trying to find an existing paint code so that it would help others restore their Boyco cans too.

The off white is as close of a match as you could expect to get. The red is close, but has slightly more of a rust color to it. The blue is right is the same family but is a little lighter in color. That one might be helped by using a darker primer under it.

Wish I could of found a red and blue that were dead on (too much of a perfectionist I suppose), but I think I wore out my welcome there just getting to this point.

Tod.

[TRDxB2]

Colors fade over time, so its always difficult to match. Viewing colors on a computer is equally challenging and even vary slightly from one to another. I think your blue & red are about as close as one can get (from your photos & mine above & additional included here). While the ad for the BOYCO cans refers to water as being gray in color and yours appears to an off white, I found another original image that appears to be the same as yours (given computer color rendition). So its a go for me.

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The fact that the mixed matching paint color is called "pale green" doesn't bother me a bit as being correct. I had a Porsche 356A that was painted Stone Gray. almost the same as the Pale Green. People would say it looked cream, others gray green, etc. I included some pictures of 356A Porsches in Stone Gray to see how color images can vary in sun light & when displayed on a computer screen. You can bet the restorers made sure that the paint was 100% correct mix on the $80,000 car.

[RVA23T]

I can see the lead in the original white paint with a yellowed or yellowish resin, leading to a pale green color.

[Tod Wirth, WI]

I had concerns about the fading/deterioration of the paint over time also. That is why I used the paint on the bottom of the cans. It was subjected to less sun/UV at least. Not much I could do about reversing the effects of time on the paint coating though.

I sanded and polished the area on the cans I was working with, to get the oxidized layer off. The paint is so thin on these cans that going right through it was an issue. I think the thinness of the paint also was why we couldn't get a good read with the color spectrometer. It was partly seeing the metal under the very thin paint layer.

Like with the colors for the early T's, unless someone can find the original paint formulas and recreate them, going from surviving examples is about all we can do.

Tod.