How to tell if a Dino 246 has been painted - most obvious signs

You can look up under the dash with a flashlight to see if you can see remnants of an old colour. Other than that you would want to try to peek in somewhere under the inner door trim to try and catch a look at the inside of the door. These should be among the easier ways to find out. My experience is that most cars have been painted and that owners say they have original paint only because the last owner told them as much.

 

The cars would have been painted in body colour first with the black added afterwards. The people who painted the car only really cared about the visible areas of black so you need to imagine what areas of the car may still have some overspray remnants of the original colour where the black would have missed. Another thing to do is to peel up any edge trim like around the trunk or engine bay thin trim and look for evidence of another colour. Because these cars have so much black trim paint on them it is not super hard to get a really good colour change that is impossible to see without starting to disassemble things (the inner door trim panels) being the easiest to do.

 

It's called a paint depth gauge. They really work !
Gary Bobileff

 

A paint depth gauge is only worthwhile to see variations between panels or sometimes a re-spray in the same colour where the door jambs maybe were not touched. If a car got even a scuff and re-paint (let alone a bare metal re-spray which would have been a requirement on most original lacquer finishes) the gauge would run a fairly even amount all over. I would be wary of paint depth measurements especially if your sample size is one car and forget about comparing even an original car to the amount of paint on a modern car.

 

How accurate could this be on a car painted by hand….in the 70s

 

some people are using original paint interchangably with original color. which is incorrect and misleading.