A common misconception exists concerning motor vehicle paint. It is widely held that the color codes found on the ID tags of countless car bodies since the 1930s can be taken to any auto paint jobber and that he can from that number mix a perfectly matching batch of paint. Unfortunately, it isn't usually that simple. In the first place, the paint which manufacturers spray on their vehicles is not available for retail sale. During manufacture, agents from Dupont and PPG come to the factory and take samples of finished bodies to analyze at their facilities. They then formulate replacement paint based on those samples. But this paint doesn't always match what the factory sprayed on the vehicle, for a number of reasons. As already emphasized, it isn't the same paint, for one thing. For another, manufacturers have more than one assembly plant in most cases, and samples are usually taken from just one run at one plant. Furthermore, all painted finishes begin degrading, color-wise (and candies such as Honda's 70s finishes the fastest), and this means that the samples taken by the paint jobbers vary considerably from the paint on our vehicles within just a few months. Add to this variables in application technique, humidity and material reduction (how and how much the paint is thinned), and the result is that color matching for repair and restorative purposes is more art than science.

The paint situation with Honda motorcycles is even more complicated. To begin with, as is the case with most motorcycles, after-the-sale paint availability has been spotty at best, with such availability having taken three different forms during the company's history. The first time, during the 60s, American Honda provided a 3 oz. can of Japanese-labeled touch-up paint--it came in the crate with 750s. To my knowledge, this was the only time factory paint was available to the public. The second time Honda got involved with paint was during the 1970s, when American Honda formally endorsed the product of an Illinois-based aftermarket lubricants company called Lubritech, whose fork oil was specified by Ceriani in its early forks. Lubritech, much the way Dupont and PPG do today with cars, matched the factory paints for most manufacturers during that early (70s) period. The third time was in 1982, when Honda again took to selling paint themselves, though the paint was the product of the Los Angeles-based paint jobber Original Brands. Within a very short time, Original Brands was sold to or became Color Rite, who endeavored to supply paint for most motorcycles, including Hondas, made from 1982 onward.

To summarize, there are no color code numbers with which to mix paint for Hondas made before 1982. Lubritech's 1970s numbers are merely their part numbers, not part of a color system. Honda didn't use anything we recognize in the U.S. as a standard automotive color code scheme until 1982, and even then it wasn't really a factory program.