So I took my '87 into the shop today to get an estimate on a paint job, and the guy notices a spot on the hood where the paint is chipping off. I'd seen it too, didn't think anything of it.

Then he started picking away at the paint and showed me the different colours the car had been in the past. In its current incarnation, it's a gray-bronze-whatever colour (my avatar); previously it was gold. Before that, white. The guy was 100% sure that white was the original colour. But the factory sticker says gray!

Craziness, man.

 

white is prolly the primer. when i had my engine out i was replacing the engine bay liner and undercoating and some of my cleaners took the brown paint off the car and it was white underneath.

 

Erm, maybe just your hood is not original.....?

T

 

When I was stationed at Hickam AFB (1982-84), the PJ section was in one of the hangars bombed during Pearl Harbor. The windows were undamaged in some spots. One of the truisms in the military, is the best way to spruce something up for an inspection is to paint it with some fresh enamel. We had a big inspection one year, and you guessed it, the order to paint came down from on-high. For some reason we had civil engineering come over to do an analysis, and they discovered roughly 40 coats of paint on the window frames. Naturally they were painted shut, and with the number of layers of paint, looked like hell too.

Most I ever saw on a 356 was about 6 layers, including bondo.

 

So you went in for an estimate and let him start chipping it up?

 

Ah, it was a tiny little chip. Nothing to get upset about (though it did make me squirm a bit).

He swore the white wasn't primer, but that was my thought too. The idea of the hood not being original, now ... that's an interesting possibility.