People said to me 'you might have polished it, Brucey....' . Over here in the UK we have a quaint Anglo-Saxon turn of phrase and one such is 'you can't polish a turd'. Trust me, I know, it seems like I've been trying.
Let me explain; when I bought my red E24 it was already tatty, clearly having been partially resprayed, and with areas of rust to deal with. Although there were parts that were not a very good match and never had been, when it had been recently cut back and polished, the paint looked OK, if you squinted a bit.
But left out in the weather, the ugly truth emerged, which was that there were at least three, possibly four kinds of Zinnoberrot paint on the car already. Each one would (without weekly waxing) then fade differently.
The roof appeared to have original paint on it, which fades to a salmon pink colour. The rear of the car (excepting the boot lid) has a very slightly different shade which fades to a slightly purpley colour. The boot lid fades to an orangey hue, as does the bonnet. The right front wing has an even more orange shade (even when it is cut back; it might even be henna red...) that weathers to an even more orangey colour still. The infill on the M-tech rear spoiler appears to be the same colour. The nose of the car and the front spoiler fades to purple. All this paint is two-pack stuff.
I've also sprayed some repaired parts with Holts cellulose paint; this looked OK when I put it on, but has faded to an even more vivid shade of purple than the other stuff, and when I cut it back it refuses to do so without leaving a dark line at the joint to other paint.
Anyway, I soon got bored with cutting back and waxing, plus the paint was getting visibly thin in places, so I realised I needed to do something about it.
So, after weighing the pros can cons for a while, about four years ago I cut the paint back hard, and gave most of the car a coat of acrylic rattle can clear-coat. I'd done this before on smaller things (like bicycles) and it had worked OK. I told myself that if it didn't work out, I could soon strip the acrylic off again using a suitable solvent and some elbow grease.
For about nine months it was the cleverest thing I'd ever done. Then, gradually, the chickens came home to roost. It turned out that not only was the paint oxidising, it was also being affected by the UV, and that the clear coat wasn't stopping all of it. To my horror all the same colour changes that had been happening before happened again, only this time underneath a layer of clear coat.
To give you an idea of how bad it looked, at this stage I didn't even see any benefit in trying to paint repair areas in anything other than red primer; this was no worse a match than the paint on some of the other parts of the car.
Pretty soon the car looked terrible, like it had been painted by someone colourblind. Then to my amazement, it started to look even worse; on some panels (but not all) the acrylic itself started to go white and powdery. At first a little wax polish would make it look OK for a while and then it got so bad not even that would work.
[Worse still, some of the parts that I had painted about seven years earlier started to peel; I know the reason why, too; Halfords zinc primer. Not labelled correctly as a pure acrylic (thank you Halfords, you idiots), it eventually reacted with the next-but-one paint layer.]
So I decided to try and sort the car out. I quickly realised that machine mopping was dangerous on anything other than a flat surface, and that solvents were a bit iffy too. Eventually I settled on T-cut, and hand cut the paint back on the wing tops and nose. I used MEK sparingly to soften the acrylic clear coat in places where it was particularly thick. It takes ages to do this; ages and ages and ages....
So when my car arrived at Gaydon I'd spent about three days doing this, used almost a full bottle of T-cut and all I'd done was part of the wings and the nose. Oh, and I'd polished the roof a bit, which had escaped the clear coating process to start with.
All rather depressing really. Obviously a complete respray is a solution, but it raises the ugly question 'with what paint, exactly?'. Clearly several professional paint shops (plus me) had royally screwed up in the past, and had used either the wrong paint altogether, or paint that was the right colour to start with, but that fades differently because the chemical pigments in it are different to OEM paint.
If I get the car sprayed, it is completely pointless if I can't then touch in areas later on, so it needs to be paint that I can buy and apply (in small areas anyway) myself if needs be.
I think that Professional paint shops in the UK may now only use water based paints and I'm not sure that they will have the same pigments as any of the paints that are on the car at present. In my mightmares I will cut through the new paint and into the old stuff, and it won't match.... there are a few areas where this has already happened...
SO.... finally getting to the point.... who knows about paint, and more specifically Zinnoberrot paint? Whose paint should I buy to most closely match the original? Is OEM paint available, and should I buy that? Are there any paints out there which don't fade so badly?
I found this thread;
http://forums.bimmerforums.com/forum/ar ... 65109.html
which suggests that Rustoleum Regal Red is a good match. But it is not sold in the UK I think, plus it might be different yet again to any of the stuff I have at present....
All suggestions are welcome, other than the obvious one of 'fixing' my car permanently, using a lighted match...
cheers
And that spray can junk has got to come off. 
