One of the major aspects of our build project will be to give it new look, with the most important part being a paint job changing the color. This is certainly one of the fun pieces and we’ve had plenty of discussions about what color to paint the Miata in our house and at the Z2 Motorsports shop. At first, we were leaning towards a blue such as the BMW Laguna Seca Blue shown below.
No doubt it’s a very pretty color, yet we really want to go with something even more unique.
A question that is frequently asked is how does one figure out what color to paint the car? A good starting point it to go to your local dealerships and see what colors stand out that you like. depending on the dealerships in your area, you may need to do some initial research online to find some colors that you have interest in and then where vehicles are located. Several of the dealerships we visited only offered very bland colors ranging from white, gray, to black. I suppose that I can’t be too critical of that as our family does have a white Jeep Grand Cherokee which we specifically wanted in that color. From there, you can take a picture of the VIN and the paint code can be looked.
In our case we approached it a bit differently, of course. My wife Melissa suggested a green color, not just any shade of green but an emerald metallic green. Her thought is that the color is unique and very rarely see it, thinks it will complement the car style well, and it’ll make the Miata stand out from all other others seen. It’s not overly loud, but certainly will get noticed. Plus, like she said, it’s her favorite color (and she has an emerald wedding ring). After doing some research, we came across an FRS in the shade we’re looking for. This was done by a company named #201wrap located in Florida, and it’s truly a fantastic color and wrap work.
One problem, we really want to use paint since it is permanent unlike a wrap which over time wears away. Plus, we’re fortunate enough to have extremely talented painters at the Z2 Motorsports shop where we can have some fun and play with some of the paint design elements.
For some vinyl colors sometimes it’s just a matter of doing an online search for the equivalent paint color code. Other times you can get a sample of the vinyl and use a body shop paint scanning tool. The scanning of vinyl can work well and other times it’s more of a challenge. Our online searching did give us the general color direction we want to go with. This led us back to the original suggestion of finding a car that’s a similar desired color at a dealership. After doing some research, we discovered that Alfa and BMW have two different green colors on current model year vehicles. While the Alfa Verde Montreal Green was nice and we liked the look of the online pictures, in person it appeared a much darker green color than we wanted.
Finding a dealership that had a vehicle in their Isle of Man Green wasn’t as simple to locate, but we did end up locating one SUV in our general area. While it was a gloomy day where it rained earlier in the morning, seeing this color in person affirmed this is the general direction we wanted to go with our Miata.
Seeing the color in person is very helpful as just looking at a picture online or worse yet, a small paint sample swatch can be misleading. Take our example below of an in person photo compared to what BMW posts on their website.
Now that we have the general color in mind, it’s time to begin the lengthy and tedious process of prepping the Miata for paint.
We hope you’ll consider following our build if you are not already.
To read additional parts of the build, in the Categories widget on the right select Miata Project Car.
