Hi All,

I live in the KC area and have noted something odd. None of the body shops here in this metro area of 2 million people will paint a whole car. All they want to do is collision repair! If I DO manage to find someone who will repaint a whole car, they say it will be a side project that they work on as they have time between other jobs. In other words, it will take a year or more for them to do. It's making me nuts! They even say that they don't want to do body work on a classic (1980's) car. Can anyone tell me why this is? I used to be able to get a whole car repainted with no problems. What is so special about an 80's car that is so different in body repair compared to today? Anyone else experience this? I'm serious about taking auto body and learning to do it myself!

 

In a nutshell...

The insurance money from collision repair is what keeps them alive. Getting and keeping the insurance work means accepting and meeting many requirements. A paint job on a hobby car is viewed as a time sponge; monkey wrench in the machinery which bollixes up production.

Cheers
DD

 

You know Doug, I am seriously considering going to a smaller town to see if I can find a body shop there that will repaint the whole car. Maybe I might have some better luck there. Here, only MAACO will do it. I am not certain I have a lot of confidence in MAACO.

 

Your looking in the wrong place? You will need to find a restoration shop. Your calling commercial body shops. As posted above their business has nothing to do with repainting old cars. It's about cash flow and insurance work.

MAACO is a high volume low quality paint chain. Do you want your car done that way?
Also you need to have a budget for this and almost all people VASTLY under estimate the time and cost for a compete repaint. Any decent job will be $5K+ and can easily run $10K+ or more depending on what's found under the existing paint.

What condition is the car in? Body damage? Rust? Been painted before? How many times? To what level do you want the car done to?
Now what generally happens is after you do get a bid or two you start to see the very high cost of body and paint work.

Your idea to DIY was why I started myself.
But that also has a steep learning curve and do you want or enjoy that kind of work? Some do and some don't.

Remember nobody cares more about your car than you!
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Yes, I have tried that. I went to a restoration shop to get a quote for a repaint, and was quoted $40,000. No, I didn't add too many zeros. That was the quote. This to me means, I don't want to paint it. Others quoted $12-$15,000 but may take a year or two to be finished. No one seems interested in repainting a whole car!

 

25 years ago I found a young painter who opened his own shop doing "restoration" work more or less on the side. He developed quite a reputation because he did nearly as high a quality as the #1 most expensive restoration shop in the region but at half the cost. The downside was by the third car I had him do for me, I had to get on his calendar a year in advance and then it was five months in his shop. But with each car, he would tell me this would be the last classic car he ever did. He was going to quit doing restoration work. As his family grew, he said he wanted to be able to close shop at 6pm, go home and eat dinner with his wife and children. But mainly, he said that he was growing frustrated with the kind of customers that brought in classic cars vs insurance work. I was always happy with his work and patient (I typically had the engine, transmission, interior etc. out and working on those myself while the car body was being done). But apparently, we enthusiasts as a group, tend to be OCD. I know I dropped in frequently to check on the progress and I guess if nothing else, each time was an interruption. But I can imagine many other customers dropping in and always getting upset just because its taking so long or they didn't like something.

Restoration work always took way more hours than original estimates because it was hard to know exactly what he was getting into until he had the car apart and stripped down to metal. A lot of times the car had been previously refinished and hid a lot of sins that would need to be done over again before it could be painted correctly. Many more times, parts would break while coming apart or he'd have to drill out rusted fasteners and there would be no place to just simply order replacements. He might have to fabricate a new clip to reattach trim or tap new threads in a hole. He would warn customers up front, and most times he could convince the customer to pay the extra costs but once he'd already gotten 100 hours into a car, he couldn't really quit if the customer balked at an extra cost so he'd agree to split it with them or often just eat it. He said he decided it just wasn't worth it when a soccer mom would be just thrilled to get her SUV back in a week as long as the fender was "close" to the same color as the rest of the car. He went even further downmarket. Eventually his yard was filled with AT&T trucks and vans awaiting repair and I had to find somebody else (tried two so far, one terrible and the other just terribly expensive so I have a project on-hold, still looking myself).

Car show season is over, but the best strategy is to ask at car shows when you see a car with a paint job that you like. Ask "Who painted your car and if you don't mind telling, how much did it cost?" The first few you ask will give cost figures that will make your eyes water, but eventually you'll learn to recognize levels of workmanship and quality that are more realistic. You may even luck out and find a painter who is young and talented and not yet so famous as to have a year long waiting list or charging much lower hourly rates or both. But note the word "Who". I learned the hard way back in 1987, don't just get the name of the shop. Its mainly the painter's talent, the guy with the spray gun in his hand, that you need to be looking for, especially with metallic and pearl finishes. Plus the painter generally has the final say whether the prep is done well enough to go into the booth. If he leaves for greener pastures and somebody else picks up the gun, the shop could be toast. Find out the name of the person who painted that car, make sure he still works there and will be the one to do yours. And when you go in for an estimate, be sure to meet him and tell him which car of his you saw at a car show so he'll know that's the level of quality that you are going to be expecting.

Another tip, you're going to run into some people at car shows who did it themselves or "had a buddy" to paint their car in a barn somewhere for a song. Yes, sometimes those amateur jobs can turn out fantastic. Its really tempting especially with cars that a professional paint job costs more than the car is worth. You'll think it looks good enough and they'll offer to do it for you or call their buddy and maybe he'll do yours too. I've tried that twice, the first time was fantastic, a young guy who was employed at a Chevy dealership body shop and worked in his two-car garage at home nights and weekends. The second time tho, I saw a stunning Shelby GT350 Mustang at a show and was introduced to an old retired guy who painted that Shelby in his backyard shop. Turned out the guy had health issues apparently affecting his eyesight as much as his work efficiency and it wound up a total disaster. At least all the fiberglass was done well, but I subsequently had to take that lowly C3 Corvette to a "professional" to be done over again, thus spending twice as much as I'd originally hoped to save. Just tell those amateurs or those offering their buddy's help, "no thanks" and stick with a professional brick-n-mortar shop with their name on the building. Good luck.

 

If you won't pay the price then be prepared to be disappointed. I have done restorations and now I ONLY work for people I know. The public is a total disaster!!

I charge materials and hours. No estimates because as posted above it is impossible. Actually the older I get the more I prefer to work only on my stuff. When it's completed then sell it and start another project. No customers involved that way. I will also note I generally make little to no money even doing it myself. It is a hobby and I treat it as such. I could never make a living doing this!

Read Phil's long post above as it matches my experiences just about 100%!
Again $40,000 does NOT mean they don't want to paint it. You just don't understand the massive cost and time involved in a total repaint?

Just to let you know it's not uncommon for the paint and body work to exceed $100,000. Current top dog restorations are now well above 7 figures and yes those shops are booked solid because of the quality of their work. As it can take several years to do this it's a common phrase that your car is stuck in paint jail! Plus as time goes on as Phil posted they may not ever get to your project.

All these factors are what caused me to get into doing my own work. Again NOBODY cares more about your project than you.
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Yes, $40,000 is not unrealistic. I talked to a local restoration shop many years ago and got a quote like that. But that shop insisted on so many hours of panel-gapping. They explained that it's their reputation that everything goes out with panel gaps within so many tenths of an inch all around. That's alot of work on 60s muscle cars that didn't come out of the factory anywhere near that perfect. Probably be a lot of work on a Lexus. Doing a Corvette of course, I would have actually lost points for correcting factory flaws like that because half the judging points are for originality. We ultimately did have the paint done better than OEM (at a different shop) and took an 85 point deduction for the paint finish being too good (about 2%), but that meant everything else had to be spot on to earn Top Flight (95%). And crazy enough, its actually more work, more expensive to reproduce factory flaws too and only a few Corvette specialists who know how to do it to the judge's satisfaction.

Better to buy cars already restored because it almost always cost more than the finished car is worth. I have an old Lotus I bought two years ago that was cosmetically restored at Ragtops and Roadsters in Pennsylvania over a three-year period. I have all the receipts showing the previous owner wrote $800 - $5,000 checks every month or two, totaling just over $63,000 ($85,000 all together with what he paid for the car, shipping from Europe, tires and other expenses). I paid less than half that, which was still a record sale price at the time, but I figured less than it would have cost me to buy any other on offer and bring it up to that same level. Just a couple extreme examples of the world you're negotiating in when talking to full restoration shops.

You can save a lot of money if you are willing to do some of the prep work yourself. I always take a totally stripped down body shell so that I'm only paying for the body work and paint. My last Corvette, the body was off the frame and delivered mounted on a dolly with casters so they could roll it around their shop. But you could remove all the trim, lights, latches, etc and separate the bumper covers so that there's no masking lines or bridging of gaps to crack later. Then put it all back together yourself when its done. You'll have a couple of flatbed charges, but that's way less than they'll charge for the work.

I've always wanted to learn to DIY my own paint jobs because of the cost. I can do some body work and I will spray filler/primer, but that's as far as I'm willing to go right now. I tried painting a tool box once to mount in the bed of my new red work truck. It was a disaster. After that I figured painting a whole car was the kind of thing you were only going to ever get good at if you do it frequently enough to develop and maintain that muscle-memory. I'm hoping that after I retire, I can build my barndominium, have proper facilities and time. I've done a few cars for friends/relatives (farming out the topcoat of course), but that's the way to go is if someone else is writing the checks. I don't have the energy to come home from the office and do another four or five hours in the evenings for others anymore like I used to tho. But doing that when I was younger I realized that I don't care if the cars are mine or somebody else's. I just enjoy doing them. My ideal early-retirement would be to find what artists call a "patron", one wealthy individual who would bring me restoration projects, pay for my parts and supplies, and cover my living expenses. I've dreamed of someday restoring some coach-built car for the lawn at Pebble Beach, but it would never happen out of my budget. If I could spend like 8-9 hour days obsessing over getting the correct re-plating finish on a batch of nuts and bolts and not have to worry about how I'm going to pay my doctor bill or eat, I'd be in heaven. And there'd be no argument over quality because there's nobody more OCD than me. Well, except maybe that guy with his panel gaps.

 

The problem, obviously, is finding a shop that'll do a "medium" paint job. Something better than Maaco but not to the $40,000 level of perfection.

A dozen or so years ago I was on a mission to get a Firebird painted for $7500. The couple shops I went to were polite enough to not actually laugh in my face although they were surely laughing on the inside. I explained my expectations...which were actually rather modest...and both said they could fix me up for about $15,000. Again, that was about 12 years ago.

This is why I and other always recommend buying a car with good cosmetics. Mechanical repairs are the very least of your worries compared to paint, chrome, rust repair, and leather.

Cheers
DD