Inside the 23-Dimensional World of A Car’s Paint Job
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| Painter Coco Gonzalez (Christie Hemm Klok) |
Hue.
Saturation. Luminance. Sparkle. Fixing a door ding is about way more
than color. (Also: Why the sky is blue and clouds are white).
Adalberto Gonzalez may well
be one of the best painters of cars in Northern California.
He doesn’t
work in the eye-popping sparkle-and-shine mode of Cali low-rider
culture, and he only rarely finds himself refinishing an Italian exotic.
Gonzalez, who goes by the nickname Coco, runs the paint room at Alameda
Collision Repair, a high-quality shop that fixes slightly more than 13
cars every day, six days a week.
Painting a panel, from a simple ding
to something much, much worse is the last stop in a car repair, which
makes it a bottleneck.
What makes Gonzalez so good is that he's fast. He
is an artist at uncorking the bottleneck. But unlike most artists, if
you can perceive even the faintest hint of his work, he has made a
mistake.
You’re thinking, big whoop. A car comes in, a 2015 Toyota Camry, let's say, in Ruby Flare Pearl
(that’s red) needing a bashed-in door Bondo’d and sanded. You just go
to a shelf and take down 2015 Toyota Ruby Flare Pearl, click a canister
into an airgun, and swoosh, you’re back on the road, right?
Nope.
Car companies have put 50,000 to 60,000 car colors on the road, but
even a big body shop like Alameda Collision Repair has just 70 or 80
colors on its shelves. Turns out Gonzalez isn't just a fast painter,
he’s a fast matcher. “I get the closest one,” he says, “and then I match the color.” More
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