OTK only sells Tony Kart green in the spray can, a quick call to OTK USA and they admitted they have no clue. Older forum posts from 2017 and before have provided previous more blood red color code. Anyone have any idea what the newer bright red code is? Yeah I know I can drag my kart to body shop/paint store to scan the color but figured I can’t be the only one thats ever been up this road?
I googled Pantone color code for OTK and Tony Kart with no luck.
Curiously the first ones were blue:
Also, this site has a lot of cool old Tony kart photos and reference stuff:
That’s because Pantone does not apply to paint. Pantone is specifically an ink color system. Ink and paint do not work the same way. So there is no Pantone for what Redspeed red would be. You could eyeball it and pick what the closest PMS color would be but it wouldn’t be a perfect match.
All that being said, I don’t know what the Redspeed color code is either unfortunately.
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Interesting. The Pantone colors we’d use were spot colors. Metallics/neons etc. our colorspace was CMYK which was very narrow gamut.
I woulda thought that Pantone did corporate identity colors.
Pantone’s PMS is used for all print-based media, including corporate identity. But you can’t mix up a paint based on a Pantone PMS color. You can match or get close to a Pantone color by mixing up paint, but the formulation to produce an actual swatch of ink in a set Pantone code isn’t necessarily useful in producing a paint that matches that color.
If a customer gives me PMS 482 as something they want on their helmet, there is no background formulation (mix 2 parts color x to 3 parts color y) that applies to whatever paint system you use. Plus, the finish you apply or the material you paint on or the amount of coats you lay down can dramatically affect the color in the end.
Pantone does have a separate color book (FHI) for things like textiles, coatings, and paint that are easier to reproduce across those mediums and tailored to work for applications that use those materials. For something like house paint you can scan a Pantone swatch and a paint store can tell you what formulation you need to mix up to match it.
RAL is a color system designed for paint that many places go by if they are looking for an actual reproducible paint code.
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In our case, we’d literally instruct the press to run an extra pass with the spot color. In many cases it was probably like doing a foil part on the helmet.
Not cheap either.
Right so you worked on a printing press?
Presumably you’d get pieces done in CMYK with a separate spot color in PMS, so yeah you’d have to print the CMYK then pull up the PMS spot color sep and run it back through the press. Because the PMS isn’t mixed from CMYK, it’s a whole separate thing. Similar to screen printing apparel. You’ve got screens made up of each individual ink color (all spot colors based on whatever system screen print ink is based on) and you run all the one color through one screen, then switch screens and run another color etc.
I haven’t done any layout/separation stuff since college really, but I always enjoyed when we would split up our documents into the different color seps and see the tangible pieces of our projects that were being printed with each ink run.
Helmet painting is basically like printing 5 different spot colors on a project.
Yeah I noticed that in your helmet video. It’s a lot like silk screening in that you go at it one color at a time.
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I was art director and production manager for the house. Our printers were in Ohio. Initially we’d create the 4 color seps and physically send them to the printer. In time it went to digital to plate.
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It’s the same color as ketchup if that helps.
Could this be it?
Pretty sure that was the previous darker blood red they used before this new fluorescent red. Thanks though!
Dang, that’s REALLY close to the ketchup color.
Wonder if it tastes the same?
Kinda reviving this thread here lol, has anyone found anything on this color, looking to get my chassis touched up
I now see someone else debunked that color as the old type. Dang.
@Kutschca just found something that was a pretty close match for the new, brighter red. I’m sure he will see this and chime in too.
Sweet, I have a few color swatches coming, I’ll make sure to share what I find
Testors enamel spray paint. Their color Bright Red is very close. I would recommend a clear over it as I was lazy and didn’t do that.
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