I got a quote to get my Z painted at a local body shop and he said to change the color, no matter what color I go with it would be a minimum of $10,000. Is this normal or a little high?

 

that's definetely on the high side....maybe extremely high quality? haha. You can't really ask that without telling us the details of the work they do. I mean go to MAACO and it's 300-600 bucks lol.

 

Nah, thats a fair price for a high quality paint job imo. To properly repaint a car the labor and time needed is huge. Everything must be removed from the car. I got a quote from a pro shop that is the place Ferrari of Glen Cove NY uses. 15K to repaint my Hummer H1(old truck I don't have anymore).

You basicly have to remove doors, hood, trunk, engine, anything that is in the way of the body. So to make a long story short.. no 10k isnt out of the ordinary. A friend of mine spent like 2k on a paint job once to repaint his Blazer before he put it for sale. It looked like complete crap and he knew it. You spend cheap, you get cheap. Hope this helps!

 

Thats what i was thinking..it sounded pretty legit. I heard MAACO is horrible many stories of their paint chipping and losing shine anyone have the truth behind these rumors?

 

obviously my sarcasm was missed.....there is truth behind those rumors

 

Haha no, I didnt catch that. Thanks for the imput guys.

 

That's no joke lol. The Blazer my friend got painted, it literally looked like Testors modeling paint lol. It looked so bad we thought the guy applied the paint with a brush rofl.

 

That's still pretty damn high. I wouldn't ever do one though, unless it was my own car. Talk about a pain in the ***.

 

If you have all the tools necessary...Painting your own car isn't really that hard. Just keep it the same color so you don't have to take all the paint off in the engine bay, small nooks and what not. It's veeeeeeerrrryy time consuming, but TONS cheaper. It's really not that tough, like I said..Just very time consuming. Plan on not driving your car for like 2 weeks if you work while doin this.

 

thats kind of a bit on the high side.i had a candy blue del sol before my z and the body shop painted it for 3500..and that hok..

 

You don't have to strip the stock paint anywhere before repainted. Just wanted to clear that up.

 

I would never pay 10K for a repaint. I would do as much of the work as possible to prep the car and let the painter finess the fianl prep and spray.

I know I can get a complete color change for 5K in NJ with a great shop if I do the prep. It just requires some work.

 

I would say minimum around $4k. Maybe more if you include the door jambs, engine bay, etc.

 

I repainted a truck for a buddy of mine one winter. It took 1 week to disassemble all the pieces, catalog the hardware, and make the list of what order everything came apart so we could do the assembly in reverse. Then it took 6 weeks to prep the truck, sanding, filling, sanding some more, filling some more. We were keeping the same color so we didn't have to worry about some spots that would likely not be seen, which saved a boat load of time. If we were changing the color, you could easily add another 3 weeks of prep work. Then it was a week of painting which included PPG epoxy primer x3 coats with 800 grit wet sanding in between, followed by 4 coats of PPG paint with 2 coats of clear and all the associated wet sanding. After it was dry we took almost 2 weeks to get everything back together, the assembly went quick enough, but we always seemed to need a bolt or a screw that we didn't have or didn't want to re-use 5 minutes before the hardware store closed 10 minutes away.

So anyway, long story short it was 10 weeks at least 5 if not 6 days a week, 2 people, after work with beers 5-6 hours mon - fri 9 hours sat / sun. $450 dollars in paint, body filler, and sandpaper. So if we do the math it works out like this.

assume 5 days per week working one of which is a weekend for extended hours, so that is (4 days M-F @ 5 hours per day x 2 people)+(1 day per week @ 9 hours x 2 people) = 58 man hours per week you use a "beer factor" of 70% because we were drinking and I'm pretty sure that slowed things down a bit, so now we are at 40.6 man hours per week x 10 weeks = 406 man hours. Now of course all of this is still on the conservative side of things so we can use an "amature factor of 85% because really how hard is sanding a bunch of body panels and that puts us at 345.1 man hours rounded down a touch you are looking at 300 ish man hours into that paint job. So we do a reverse quotation against your 10k figure lets say including all supplies, hardware, etc.... $800 in hard cost which leaves $9200 in labor and overhead. $9200/300 hours = $30.67 dollars per hour in labor and overhead, which actually sounds a bit low to me, but what the hell it's all just fun with math.

 

You guys sure did take your time. I can assure you a shop would take much less time for a repaint.

Call it 8 hours for disassembly. A car with just normal dents should be in spot primer within 4 hours. Then an hour to sand the spots down and another coat of primer (you only need two coats). Around 10 hours to scuff and trim out jams and engine bay. Partial reassembly 9 hours. After that everything can be sanded for paint prep. That should take around 4 hours. Tape up and clean off 2 hours. Paint time around 3 hours. Untaping and further assembly 4 hours. Wetsanding and buffing around 5 hours. That's a total of around 50 hours with one person doing the work.

 

That assumes that you are only doing one side of the body panel. I probably should have been clearer, it was more of a restoration project than a simple re-paint. Of course I took the entire interior out of my Z single handed, without removing the headliner or the lift gate interior finishers. Even after researching how the car comes apart for weeks, so I pretty much knew what I was doing it still took 5 hours, and I didn't take off any doors, fenders, remove any wiring, tail lights, headlights, bumpers, skirts, grille, hood, or anything else. I also only removed the kick panels, and the center radio portion from the dash. A full disassembly on a 350z for someone who knows the car like the back of their hand would easily take 16 man hours, and that assumes you don't need to document hardware, take reference pictures, or anything else. There's a lot of work that goes into it. Most people think it's like painting a lawn chair, but I assure you it is far more involved than even I've explained here.

Of course hiding in the garage with a buddy drinking beer for 10 weeks wasn't exactly doing hard time, so we probably stretched it a bit longer than we needed to, but if you knew my ex-wife you would have taken 10 months.

 

I understand. I personally wouldn't take out the interior. Just the finishers. It shouldn't take that long though. To give you an idea here's a story about when I worked at another shop. We had a Ranger that had to have the cab clipped and a parts Ranger beside it. We started on the two at around 3:00. By around 9:00 we had the interiors stripped to what needed to be, had the parts clip cut out and unbolted, the bad clip cut out and the good one tacked in and bolted up.

 

holy crap, i didn't realize it would be that expensive.

 

Maybe $!0.000 if he is also going to be a ShowCar or also going to rent you a hooker for the 2007 Year ..