I had a local shop paint these for me. I'm kinda color-blind, and I know I suck at paint. Some stuff you leave to the experts. The shop I used for previous projects closed up, so I had to hunt for someone to take this on. Many regular body shops won't touch this stuff, but the smart ones realize that work like this is good 'filler' when they are between jobs. The painter at this place is a bike guy and he knew exactly what I was after. I was not a fan of the original dark blue (almost black if you ask me) and had been looking around for other examples of restored CB350F's. I found a few examples that were OEM silver. From what I could tell, this looks like it was a Euro color. At any rate, I really liked it. Of course there are no color codes, and I never expect to see another silver CB350F roll up next to this one, so I went with what was in my imagination. In speaking with the painter, I got talking about all the metal flake colors that used to be around in the 70's. He explained that he couldn't do that, but what he could do was amp up the metallic in the paint and make it resemble that. I looked at some paint chips (said the color-blind guy) and said 'Let's go for it!'. His boss was nervous, and agreed on the condition that I stop by once they completed the initial color and 1st clear coat to give a final approval. They would be scuffing the tank, applying the decal, and shooting the final clear coat after that. Needless to say, I really dig the way it came out. They fixed the dings in the tank and shot everything the same color. The only hiccup was a bit of dirt in the final clear coat on the tank, which the painter buffed out without a problem.
