AMC ENGINE PAINT CONFUSION

The following is a sort of chronology of events from when this issue first became known to me in 1995 that occurred as an investigation over several years to solve the AMC engine paint confusion. As it turns out, there should never have been any confusion at all despite AMC’s propensity for using whatever was at hand and keeping minimal records.

The bottom line is this: It states clearly on page Ge – 15 of the Parts Book 1967 to 1972 exactly what the engine colour is. There is no ambiguity at all - no guess work required. The colour is still available, it has always been available. For subsequent years the correct colour is listed as well in the later edition of the parts book.

            When I wrote the first six of THE INTERNATIONAL REBEL MACHINE NEWSLETTERS in 1995 and 1996, I published a page from the Parts Book that showed all of the Rebel Machine colours – exterior and interior (less two that were later added in an internal AMC bulletin that Patrick Foster still has a copy of). I didn’t publish the engine paint or the trunk spatter paint numbers because at the time because I missed them in the book. They are difficult to spot even when you know they’re there.

            At the time, heat paint was all the rage and paint companies took full advantage of people who knew nothing about paint other than what they learned from rumours and innuendo. Pretty well everyone at the time bought into it including me. Heat paint was a product that the market wanted so strongly that when the paint manufacturers understood what was going on, they simply marketed their regular autobody paint as heat paint even though they knew there was no such thing. It was a placebo and a way of shutting people up who didn’t know any better.

When this “heat paint” did become available for AMC the colour of paint that was marketed for AMC’s was Alamosa Blue Metallic and it was sold by Seymore of Sycamore – an AMC paint supplier. No one seemed to know that this was not actually the correct colour including me.

At the time I was having my #3 Rebel Machine’s original 390 rebuilt and upon completion it was sprayed with Alamosa Blue. I didn’t think or even know about the colour matching thing and it didn’t occur to me to simply have the original engine block colour matched. It wouldn’t have mattered though because I was still under the mistaken impression that what was needed was the authentic heat paint. Everything about that build up was unlucky right down to the paint colour.

            Then in 1998, I had the bright idea to take a good look at the original and untouched (with after market paint) paint overspray on the bell housing from the Rebel Machine I’d owned since August of 1970 – the only original paint left on the whole car. The sample was taken to Sherwin Williams. They scanned it in and told me what the colour was. It turned out to be Sea Foam Aqua Metallic. It is a 1970 colour. What wasn’t clear at the time was that this paint colour was an anomaly and it added more confusion to the issue.

So for a brief period, Sea Foam Aqua Metallic was accepted as the correct engine colour so the paint chip from my original bell housing was used to order a can of the good stuff. When I went to pick up the finished product I took along a 304 valve cover with the same colour on it. It was a perfect match. I ordered more of the paint and self-etching primer. When the engines were painted originally, there was no self etching primer applied. The finish paint just went straight on the bare metal. It’s the application of the self etching primer that allows the paint to perform better and last longer than it used to. The ratio for painting an engine worked out to one can of primer and two cans of finish colour when using spray bombs.

I bought a quantity of the paint and sold it to customers in the belief that it was the correct paint colour. For whatever reason, as far as I can remember, the people who bought the paint had engines that were newer than 1972.

You know how it is when you’ve irrevocably invested your money in something and are completely committed in every way that you finally find the information that you needed in the first place that completely wrecks your marketing plans? Well that’s exactly what happened to me. Shortly after spending a pile of money on Seafoam Aqua Metallic, my parts book opened magically to page Ge -15. and there, about a quarter of the way down the page under Miscellaneous Paints . . .   was the information we all needed all along:

Trunk Spatter Finish (Ditzler) ……………   DX1768

Engine Blue (Ditzler)  ……………………..   DQE13730

            That little nugget of information made the original paint on my untouched bellhousing a bonafide anomaly that confirms that the official engine colour was not the only colour used. In conversations Pat Wnek and I had about it we both concluded that Sea Foam Aqua Metallic must have been used extensively as we both remembered that colour on engines in our respective areas – Kenosha and Toronto – both American Motors manufacturing areas (Brampton is a satellite of Toronto).

So how did the Alamosa Blue thing get started? Neither of us remembered that colour on anything. In the course of the investigation that was spread over a number of years, I had occasion to talk to Larry Mitchell about it. It was from Larry I learned that the Alamosa Blue Metallic was from Seymore of Sycamore – an official paint supplier to AMC. Their paint number was EN66 #_ftn1 - - - Alamosa Aqua Metallic (Ditzler)  …………...  DQE2005 #_ftn2 - - -             Larry said that he saw the paint personally at the AMC engine plant in Wisconsin one day in 1969. According to Larry, AMC got their paint in five gallon pails from Seymore of Sycamore. AMC, Larry went on to say, was not all that particular about what colour the engines were painted and if they ran out of the colour they were using and couldn’t get the proper colour because it was backordered or whatever, then they would use what was available. I don’t think any of us would have trouble believing that. He illustrated the story with an example of Chrysler using the wrong year of reverse dash lights on 1970 Coronets during his shift (he was told to install them despite his objections). Basically, the view seems to have been among car manufacturers, if it fits, it looks okay and the correct part (or paint as in this case) is not available, then use it until the correct material is available. Don’t slow down or stop the line.

            One of the things Larry stressed in our conversation was that the colour could have faded from one colour to the other. However, while paint may lighten, it cannot change hue.

            Further research with Sherwin Williams revealed that the trade name for AMC Engine Blue is Caravelle Blue.

            Sherwin Williams' paint and chemical specialists exploded the myth about heat paint. The only colours heat paint comes in is black, white and silver. That’s because the pigments used to colour paints are heat sensitive and don’t survive at temperatures over 1000°F. Headers get much hotter than that so without a thick buffer between the headers and the heads, the paint eventually discolours. The buffer is generally the header gasket. Of course today, the paint survives much better if you use the self-etching primer first.

As a favour to my Newsletter subscribers I used to stock the engine paint and touch up colours for the RWB Machines. But since I’m not a paint retailer and wasn’t making a profit, I don’t make a habit of it. As well, there are serious health issues with automotive paint due to the VOC’s – Volatile Organic Compounds they're made with. That may have changed in recent years and maybe the VOC’s have been mostly removed as is happening with other types of paints. Regardless, the paint itself is fairly lethal and not something I want to spill in my house. It’s so dangerous it’s illegal to work with it where children are or can be present in most jurisdictions.

Again, you can check this, Sea Foam Aqua is the paint colour listed in the Parts Book for engines 1973 and up. I believe there was another change before lights out but am not sure exactly when. Regardless, it will be recorded in the Parts Book. There is no mystery.

Thank you for clearing that up billd about Caravelle Blue - for once and for all I hope.

However, as far as it being possible for paint to run out - Larry Mitchell has a pretty good reputation as an AMC historian and I have to say that I believed and still believe what he said about his experience at the engine plant. He knows too many obscure details about that event and others to be fabricating anything. He was sincere and honest in my estimation. Add to that the fact that AMC's computers of the day were not the computers we have become used to. That computer room would have been a room full of mainframes and their use was not nearly as flexible, powerful or useful as even a base model PC today. Plus there was no internet. Communications were crude by today's standards. Photocopy machines were in their infancy having just evolved from wooden trays with about a 1/2" of chemicals in them that you fed special paper through to make copies one at a time.

Mis-communications between manufacturers and suppliers were notoriously poor by today's standards and all sorts of fixes and shenanigans were employed to keep the lines going. The word “backordered” was in heavy use in those days. There was no such thing as just-in-time shipping and calculations about how much of a given product to order was partly or mostly based on human estimates, not computer projections the further into the model year you went.

Not all of the model year's cars or engines of a colour were built at the same time. The initial runs were done with colours being applied to cars one after the other. After that, the colours were applied to the shells according to customer order in the order the orders came in. That's why you can't use the VIN to determine the sequence the car came down the line. On a Machine it's the 'W' number on the bottom of the door tag that determines order of production. The VIN's were numbered according to the order of the documents sitting on someone's desk - the order in which the paperwork was completed in other words.

AMC was notorious for poor to non-existent record keeping. That is the single biggest reason there is so much confusion about what was and was not original on our cars. No PC's meant most day to day record keeping was done by hand and kept as hard copies much of it hand written. Our build sheets in Machines are little scraps of paper with a hand written directive – ‘Mach spec 059”. They were not real build sheets as other manufacturers knew them. Most of the production standards were processes that were word of mouth. It was not unheard of for cars to be built to order and then painted the wrong colour and subsequently refused by the customer.

As for production standards, Rebel Machines are a classic example. The Red, White and Blue cars were supposed to be built with the first 1,000 in RWB before January 1970. But based on survival rates and evidence from the Rebel Machine Registry run by Mickey Ziomkowski; that almost certainly could not have happened. There are not enough pre-January 1 1970 cars in the registry before the first solid colour cars were built when you compare those numbers against the total known production. It was specifically noted in the Press Kit that RWB cars could not and would not be produced with a vinyl roof but we now know that one was and was butt ugly. It was also stated that all Machines came with factory ram air and hood tach but we now know that one Machine was delivered with a regular hood, no scoop, no tach, no pigtail to hook up to a tach and no evidence that the wire harness had ever been tampered with. The very first Machine used in all of the advertising shoots was different in a multitude of ways from the production run and the very last Rebel Machine built was hand built by the factory and it differed from the production run in other ways. Throughout the run, there were all sorts of verified anomalies. There were three production runs of the stripe kits. The original art from the first run must have been lost because the second run of stripes was quite different from the first and the third run corrected the mistakes of the second and reverted back fairly faithfully to the original run. The variation in interiors is adventure in production standards departures – they weren’t common but they did exist – mostly because if it meant making a sale, AMC was hot on the trail.

And there were all sorts of ways to put things together and still be acceptable. Notably, the lever on the highback bucket seats could go on two different ways. The correct way was with the tab above the pivot screw. But many were installed upside down. You know they are upside down when you stop to think about it because in this position they are difficult to operate and they catch on the clothes of people entering and exiting the back seat. Plus the correct position is shown in ‘the Mix for the Seventies from American Motors’ on the 28^th (facing) page.

Another thing to remember was that if possible, AMC sold its prototypes. None of the prototypes conformed to production standards and as a result, some of the prototypes have affected restorations. So then you have to ask yourself what exactly were the production standards? Basically they were guidelines that everyone knew would be bent or broken in certain cases when a sale was on the line. In those days, a departure from standard did not cause system wide convulsions the way rigid manufacturing practices do today.

The other factor often overlooked is the effect strikes had on materials supply and there were plenty of strikes during that model year. In those days, strikes were more common in the auto sector than they are now and the disruptions were often debilitating. In the event of a strike against a supplier, make do’s were the order of the day. Things didn’t run anywhere nearly as smoothly back then as the rosy mists of the intervening years seem to suggest. The 1970 Camaros didn’t appear until half way through the 1970 model year due to a strike. All of the manufacturers had to contend with severe supply problems that year.

As for product controls, AMC was the best of the Big Four as they were known then. But even that was dismal by today’s standards. Fit and finish on domestically produced cars of all types was rough with the 1970 Corvette winning the Lemon of the Year Award from Seymore Balz of Cars Magazine for fit and finish. If quality control hadn’t been such an issue, Ralph Nader wouldn’t have had any ammunition. He took shots at AMC as well as the rest of them. Plus AMC had some truly horrific production secrets that eventually became a major factor in their being bought by Chrysler and ensured that at some point, AMC was going to come to an ignominious end no matter what.

Anyway, the bottom line is that production standards were followed most of the time but there were enough departures without proper record keeping that ensured that future generations would of necessity continue to scratch their head in frustration.