RAL Colour Charts are ideal for use in reference to choose a suitable colour for painting using powder coat colours although other tools such as RAL Colour Swabs and RAL Colour Control Cards are often more useful.

A RAL Colour Chart is ideal for hanging on the wall for general reference Powdercoating and for use when discussing power coating colours over the phone. However, they are not ideal for use in the workshop, especially if they are pinned to the wall. This is where RAL Colour Swabs and Control Cards come in.

A RAL Shade Swab is a fan of colour coated plastic with each fan detailing a different RAL Tone & Colour. This fan is ideal for use in the work shop as well as off site and at a customers factory when discussing important powder coating decisions. The RAL Shade Swab can be placed on an item to give a more accurate representation of the intended finished powder coating to me applied to the metal component. Most Swabs have several hundred colours on them offering a complete range of colours, shades and tones available as powder coated finishes, and the RAL Swab will help to determine the preffered choice of powder coated finish.

However, the limitations of the RAL Shade & Colour Swabs are almost as tight as those of the RAL Tone Charts pinned to the office wall. The small Swab tabs which are generally only 100mm long and 40mm wide do not offer an exact colour match, only a close representation. This is where a RAL Colour Control Card comes into play.

The Colour Control Card is a large specially prepared colour coated card prepared by the paint manufacturer. powder coating Colour Cards offer a perfect match against the manufacturers paint and can be kept as reference for later colour matching exercises. RAL Coating Cards are suitable for permanent colour references for technical documentation as well as legal contract referencing. Whilst all colours might vary slightly due to changing powder coating environments and respective curing regimes, the RAL Shade & Colour Card is considered the definitive reference for paint matching against RAL Powder Coating Colours.

Common colours include:

-green beige
-sulfur yellow
-vermilion
-signal orange
-orient red
-signal violet
-olive green
-emerald green
-traffic green
-squirrel grey
-tarpaulin grey
-graphite grey
-saffron yellow
-ultramarine blue
-papyrus white
-copper brown
-clay brown
-yellow grey
-turquoise blue
-high reflective green
-heather violet
-red lilac
-orient red
-raspberry red
-tomato red

Ral Colour Swabs are available in the K7 format which shows 5 colours per fan finger, and as such is a cheaper fan type as well as the K5 which has more fan fingers each of which is dedicated to a single RAL tone, shade or colour.