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 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 unfortunate. To begin with, as is the case with most motorcycles, after-the-sale Honda paint availability has been spotty at best, with such availability having taken three different forms during the company's history (as of this writing in the late 1990s). The first time, during the 1960s, Honda provided a 3 oz. can of Japanese-labeled touch-up paint in the crate with first-generation, SOHC CB750s (personally confirmed), and likely other models. To my knowledge, this was the only time factory paint was ever made 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 powersports manufacturers during that early (70s) period. The third time was in 1982, when Honda again took to selling paint themselves, though as with Lubritech the paint was the product of a Los Angeles-based paint provider named 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. Lubritech's 1970s numbers are merely their part numbers, not part of a color system. Honda didn't use a standard color code scheme until the 1980s, when we saw alphanumeric code labels on the frames. But even then it wasn't a factory program, and at this late a date no one knows how to use that system to effect.

Your choices are these: A) Do what almost everyone does and find an existing paint color that is the closest to what you want to use. Or, B) find someone who has already done the work of custom-mixing the exact color you want. There are a number of people on the Internet who have paved the way for you. Or C) go to one of several companies who specialize in repainting vintage motorcycles.