scheming

The nice thing about a cart is, it's never too early to go ahead and get it out in front of the horse.  With that in mind, I started thinking about paint schemes for Matilda before I even bought her.  Now I'm close to being ready to send her to a body shop, but I still can't decide what paint scheme I want.

Soon after I bought Matilda, I decided to find a photo of a 1965 Impala that I liked, trace it off of my laptop screen, and then I made photocopies so that I could color them to try out different ideas.

When I first started thinking about it, I thought I wanted the car to be basically white, partly in tribute to Bertha, and partly to try to keep interior temperatures down in the hot Texas sun.  One of the early ideas I had was something like this:

 

The pattern of the stripes is a tribute to a really great old Matchbox car called the "White Lightning."  Somewhat coincidentally, the paint scheme of the White Lightning was modelled on the paint scheme of the Gatorade-sponsored Monte Carlos of the DiGard Racing team, which is the same team that Darrell Waltrip was driving for when he was driving the original Bertha, which my Bertha was named after.  I also built a pinewood derby car with a paint scheme inspired by the White Lightning, and it won a trophy.  Seems like these stripes are central to some kind of Unified Field Theory of my personal automotive history....

 

As for the red/orange rims, I just like the look of brightly colored rims on a race car, I guess.

 

But, I thought maybe the black stripes on the roof would defeat the purpose of the white car, as far as heat was concerned, so I also tried an inverted scheme:

Eventually, though, I started to think that the stripes were too flashy, and I thought I'd consider something simpler.  I love the look of a flat black hood, and it's functional, too, in that it prevents the sun from glaring off your hood when it gets low in the sky.  A simple white car with a flat black hood and red rims would look pretty good, I thought:

 

One of the more successful 1965 Impalas that raced in NASCAR was painted a light metallic purple color called "Evening Orchid."  I read somewhere else that this was considered a signature color for GM in the 1960s, to the point where a Ford driver who was unhappy about the lack of support that he was getting from Ford once decided to paint his Ford Evening Orchid just as a "screw you" to Ford.  Anyway, I like the idea that the cars were still so literally "stock" back then that they were actually run in factory colors, so I started looking through other colors that were available from the factory for 1965 Impalas.  One of my favorites is a very pale yellow called, "Goldwood Yellow":

 

A lot of people have told me that they don't much care for that color, but I like it.  It's almost a cream color, and I think it looks good.  This scheme would keep the flat black hood, but it's meant to have gloss black rims in this picture.

 

Some of the other factory colors that I liked were "Madeira Maroon," "Glacier Gray," "Cypress Green," and "Danube Blue."  I also discovered that Matilda was originally "Cameo Beige" when she left the factory.  The problem with anything Maroon down here is that everyone assumes you're an Aggie.  The Glacier Gray looks too silvery for me.  Cameo Beige isn't too far off from a cream color, either, but still ... beige ... kind of boring.

 

I really love Danube Blue.  It's a very deep blue, almost black, like the Chicago Bears' helmets.  I couldn't really recreate it on paper, but you can look it up with a Google Image search if you want to see it.  It's very tempting as a color option, but I just can't think of a color for the rims that I think would look good with it, I guess.

 

Finally, I was looking around online, and I found a photo of a 1965 Impala that Jim Paschal raced, and I thought it looked great.  I think it's black, although I'm not 100% sure that it isn't Danube Blue.  Anyay, it looks to me like it's black with one relatively narrow white stripe down the center, and red rims.  Based on that racing scheme, I drew up this potential scheme for Matilda:

This is definitely one of the frontrunners right now, and maybe my default choice.  The black goes against the original idea of trying to pick a light color to keep interior temperatures lower, but sometimes you have to give up comfort in the name of looking awesome.  And it's probably futile to try to keep temperatures down in Texas heat, anyway.

Yesterday I was thinking that some kind of medium-to-dark-gray with one black stripe down the center would also look good with red rims, though.  Seems like it's hard to find gray paints, though; they all seem to tend to look silver.

Anyway, those are some of the schemes that I've been considering so far.  I think the car will be ready to go to the body shop in the next couple weeks, though, so the time to make a decision is getting closer....