Does anyone else have a bike that is painted in a burnt orange colour and that you did touch ups to it? What did you use as a paint source for this? I know there are some cars in that colour but can't find any touch up paints to match it. Here's an example of the bike colour I'm trying to match.

The nail polish aisle is your friend for this.

Personally- that bike is way too nice to think about repainting... but it's got a lot of touch ups needed. And if the touch ups aren't perfect- it's going to look really poor.

(I did this to my 86 Voyageur- and it did not turn out well- the paint matched when I put it on- but when it dried- it got WAY darker than the paint- same thing happened with my Trek 720- but there were far fewer touch ups needed)

I think I'd clean up the rust on the exposed metal and clear over it- (clear nail polish is awesome).

This Centurion is burnt orange with an undercoat that made it impossible to match. Full chrome actually. I think you're looking at a redo.

I mixed a couple different shades of orange from Testor’s hobby enamel line. I don’t remember the shades, but they have quite a selection. Take your fork to a nearby hobby shop to match— you might find something close enough.

here's my best Testors match. I was pretty green at this mind you.

Noooo, not looking good for touch up paint options, ha ha. I did try the nail polish route a while back but the pharmacy near me had a poor selection and then when I was trying to explain it was for a bike, the young girl looked at me as if I was nuts.

I have some Testor's paints so I can trying doing some mixing to see how that works. I sure wish there was an easier way to match the paint like you can with a car.

Nice to know that I'm not the only person to struggle with finding a match for orange!

My orange is Dupont Imron....



One attempt to find a matching color was to go to paintscratch.com
I think I gave them the Imron color code and they sent a bottle of touch-up paint that was supposed to match.
Not really a success.



I tried Testors too. I don't recall specifically how I ended up with this bottle of Brilliant Orange. I might have mail-ordered it.
It ended up looking more "hot pink" than orange. Not even in the ballpark.



The last attempt was to go to my favorite automotive paint shop and see what they could do. They have been very good to me in the past, and when they mixed up this little bottle, it looked like a perfect match.


Somehow, once the stuff was on the frame and dried, it wasn't any better than the paintscratch.com stuff.
I've never had this problem of paint changing color for my other bikes. Is this something unique to orange?

Steve in Peoria

steelbikeguy Definitely no matches in the selections you found, frustrating. And yet, when you google images of orange cars (you can probably use the same code you have) there are so many varieties that look like a match, yet hard to find the matching touch up paint!

I think I'm going to try a red, yellow, orange mixture of Testors paints and then throw in a metallic gold auto touch up paint to give it that sparkle look. I hate mixing paints cause you may get it right on one occasion but then not be able to duplicate it the next time.