So just for fun, I stirred up that new gallon of PPG Concept “Ermine White” and dobbed a bit on a few small parts from the car that still had original paint, to check the match. IT DOESN’T MATCH! Doh! The new color has a very slight pinkish hue (cue Seinfeld theme song), where the original paint has more of a yellowish hue. This baffled me, as I was told that this color was mixed using the formula from the PPG national database. If this really is what PPG calls Ermine white, it means that there are hundreds, if not thousands of restored Impalas and Corvettes out there with the WRONG color on them! This I find hard to believe… maybe it’s my eyeballs? So I took a color acuity test online… check it out HERE. This is a standardized test, and I got a perfect score! So it’s not my eyes that are fooling me. I called Tom, the PPG Guru who mixed it up for me, he said to spray some out, mixed with hardner etc just to double check, since the paint dob may not be a true representation of how the color would look sprayed on the car. Sadly, this made no difference. Here’s a pic of the test panel that I sprayed, laid on top of some original 1960 GM paint… even in this pic you can tell that the colors are not the same, even if the pinkish hue doesn’t show up.
I’ll have to bring my original painted parts to Tom to see what we can do.
UPDATE: 12/21/09
Tom at the PPG store did some checking and made some phone calls since we talked last, and apparently the last time the formula was updated for Ermine White in the Concept line was in 1998, and at that time a typo was made. They had a decimal out of place, causing there to be far too much red than there should have been. Tom was able to find the error by cross checking the other paint lines in the same color, Omni, Acrylic Enamel, etc. Those other paint lines had the correct formula. This info was given to the big-wigs at PPG, and the formula is now corrected in the national database. The gallon of paint was replaced with a new one, and now I’m good to go, with the correct TRUE shade of 1960 Chevrolet Ermine White! So yes, as mind boggling as it may seem, there are probably more than a few restored early 1960’s GM cars out there with the wrong shade of Ermine white on them…. doh!