Good afternoon, There is a 1986 328 GTS for sale that the owner used a paint depth meter on & it fluctuated between 6 mils & 16 mils. I know that its normal for paint fluctuations on earlier cars, but did it fluctuate that much? Thanks in advance.
The paint quality was very inconsistent in those days and shipping damage was not terribly uncommon. Many cars had paint repairs before the dealers ever saw them.
My rule of thumb after metering literally hundreds of Ferraris from this period is: suspect anything 10 mils or higher as aftermarket paint. And remember that each panel was painted individually, so what you want to see is (somewhat) consistency in a body panel, not necessarily consistency between body panels. If you see matching thickness on adjacent panels, and then the paint getting thinner as you go out, that's usually a sign of blending.
