Originally Posted by
McDave
I'm no painter but it sounds like Mystic, a special paint Ford used on a few '95 Thunderbirds and a couple years on Mustang Cobras. It's very expensive and thus very rare. I found reference that whenever a Cobra needs repainting a representative from Ford brings the special Dupont paint to the Dealer body shop and waits until the car is finished, then takes the leftover paint back with him. Other makes of cars also use a color-shifting paint, but Ford protects it's particular blend for exclusivity's sake, though the Chameleon blue Mystic Thunderbird paint looks very similar to your bike. Cool stuff!
The custom factory paint which I saw on one Ford Cobra around 1996 was pretty amazing. It changed colors, under the same lighting, depending on which angle you viewed the car from. You could stand directly beside it and looking toward the front of the car it would be a rich candy metallic Purple, but then looking toward the rear it was a deep metallic candy Green. The transition even viewing it at a few inches from the car and in bright sunlight was impossible to understand. The car was parked outside a restaurant and in no time there were a dozen or more otherwise intelligent adult business men gathered around simply gawking with their faces pressed close to the car and scratching their heads like a group of primitive savages. The car's owner finally came out. Obviously accustomed to the scene, he chuckled and said it was a new custom experimental paint they were just beginning to test on a few cars as an option. The only hint he could offer was that he was told the paint was applied in several seperate layers of color and there were actually something similar to tiny prisms embedded in the base, all under multiple layers of clear to give the wet candied look. He said the paint job option had cost him an additional
"several thousand dollars" - enough to raise the total cost for that car an additional 20%.
There you go Dr. D. ~ Figure out the formula or the concept and nobody will EVER let you rest.
I'm so tired of seeing so many gaudy paint jobs and massive billboards full of logos plastered onto so many bikes since the late 1980s, I find that I'm now becoming drawn to very simple and basic colors - such as the simple light blue Paramount someone had posted earlier.
