Does it really matter? Your personal choice. Others might have different ideas.

The colour of a machine makes no difference to its performance. The last place I worked in painted everything, machines and benches and everything else a bright yellow ! Maybe it reminded them of Spring or else they got the paint cheap. Made no difference ,everything worked the same, so go for your colour of choice.

I actually thought Meddings used blue anyway, they must have changed colours in the past?

I wonder why so many machine tools were painted either Grey or Green? The last Harrison M300 they bought where I used to work was white, if not at least a very, very pale Grey.

My pet hate with repainting is that people paint over useful things like motor rating plates and fasteners that crack all the paint off when dismantling is required. I like the blue.my MF4 is blue but the M10 is grey but will be blue one day

Mike

My Meddings bench-drill is a mid-blue, in I think without traipsing down the garden to have a look, a light hammer finish.

It keeps company, a Drummond hand-shaper painted white many years ago: I don't know the original colour for that but suspect deep maroon.

A while ago I repaired a small 'Record' drill-vice that had lost all its paint thanks to having been used in a grit-blasting cabinet! Once I'd screwed on a flanged bush to replace the cast-on but snapped-off, T-headed spigot under the moving jaw, I finished it with spray primer and guessed-at "Record Blue", both from Halfords. The blue was probably labelled something like "Rolls-Royce Azure Seas", but the mended vice looks right, works well and has paid for the aerosols umpteen times over.

(You think that past use bad? The grit-blasting had not really harmed the important parts of the vice. On a geology-club visit to a masonry-stone quarry, I was not the only one to spot the sad site of a Bridgeport turret-mill and big Dean, Smith & Grace lathe, both obviously used for machining architectural parts from the quarried sandstone! There are machine-tools made for such work, but perhaps those unfortunate specimens had come at the right price and if not adopted by the stone works might have been scrapped…)

That's the colour! Much nicer than the hammerite dark green. Funnily enough I have one of these drills waiting for restoration so I'm watching with interest.

Some before and after pics would be good!

And I'm sure Myfords were painted with leftover admiralty grey for the next 50 years or so.