AFX factory blemish: An Interesting Observation.

...talking about the helmet or the depth of color on the stripe?

Guys; I am sure that Aurora employed a vast sea of Singapore's finest tampo painters to produce this car in the  quantities that the market required. We can safely say hundreds of thousands, and certainly millions if you include all of the early nonmagnatraction Can-Am AFX offerings. Having used Phil Pignon's templates from Road Race Replicas to paint Hot Rod grills and AC Cobra cockpits, I can tell you for the uninitiated the results will vary greatly from car to car , but for those who painted hundreds of cars in a week, the differences were not enough to not pass the army of inspectors at the end of the assembly line. I am sure that from a cultural standpoint, the average employee knew nothing about the racing scene of the day and what was the norm as far as a proper rendition of a helmet safety shield or an entire race car for that matter.  They just painted cars as they were instructed, day in and day out. The size of the area that received coloring would vary according to the distance the tampo or template was held from the car, and in practice this was probably not an exact science but nontheless dictated by the need to obtain good results as far as the  inspection side of the coin was concerned. They needed the job, their performance depended on it,  and it fed the family well. From a statistical standpoint- if we gathered up all of our cars we would notice a number would be with perhaps more correct and narrower helmet face screens, and I am betting an almost equal number would have a panaview screen. A statistical outlyer then would be a car with no painted windscreen at all. Perhaps another example would be to say that one early hominid fossil was indicative of an entire species, and I can say with absolute certainty that this is not the case. Interestingly the Tuff Ones Dino that is missing a passenger side number and roundel was recently discussed, and of the several examples that were in our community- all were missing the same roundel and number respectively. We may think it to be a blemish, that it somehow got past that army of inspectors at the end of the line-but I think it for some reason was just the way it was supposed to be. God Bless! Tonymgbbrown

Knowing how photographs can be - is it possible one is a black striped car?

Ray. It's not black. Maybe a 1/4 shade greyer than the other.

I'm yet to see an Orange, Black McLaren but even viewing it from the Bob Beers Bible you can see a huge difference between the Grey and Black striped versions.

My two cars are much less of a difference.

A.