Quote:
Originally Posted by HO455
I'm going to get my soapbox out now.
There is NO such thing as a "simple paint job"!
The shop I was involved with did a lot of restoration work. If someone came in and asked for a simple paint job the owner would ask a couple of questions but at thar point 75% of the those folks were told we couldn't do the work. It's not that we couldn't do the work, it was that we didn't take on customers who didn't understand what was involved with what they wanted. Insurance work doesn't have customers who won't pay because they see overspray in the door jab next to the hinge.
The days of buying $40 of acrylic enamel and spraying are gone. Materials alone nowdays start at $150 and go up exponentially from there. A thousand dollars in materials is common. Today's shops almost exclusively use 2 or more part paint sytems.
Every shop has a paint system that they use (some bigger shops may have 2 or more) and they generally won't use something else as these systems cost the shop money just being there. Why would a shop loose money because you want to use a different kind of product? Conscientious painters won't spray products that they are unfamiliar with or have had poor results with in the past. Especially on restoration work as restoration customer expections are very high.
The type of pant job to restore Jim70Chevy's truck is going to require real estate in the shop. All of those pieces will have to be painted separately and then assembled for final coating. This means several trips through the paint booth. Humans will have to handle every piece into the booth and then out of the booth. Where they will have to sit and cure several days before being assembled. Use of the floor space in the facility is not free nor is the labor to move your parts. The smaller the shop the more valuable floor space is.
In the auto body repair business today almost every shop is contracted to an insurance company just to stay alive. Those insurance companies demand that every facet of the shop be only focused on doing their collision repairs. The insurance adjusters are constantly in the shop and if you have restoration work going on they report it to their bosses, who in turn tell to owner of the shop they won't be getting any more collision work from them until the offending vehicle(s) are removed. The insurance company contracts stipulate this. A shop owner is not going to lose his/her bread and butter to paint your truck.
And there is the whole employee issue. There are very few body men out there who like restoration work. The rest all work for the flat rate the insurance companies pay. There is no flat rate for block sanding the hood on your truck so it looks like glass. That is hourly work and they can make twice as much doing insurance work. As such they won't take a pay cut to do restoration work.
So all this leads back to restoration shops who can only survive by cutting every corner and charging as much as they can get away with and the top shelf shops that don't cut corners and the price reflects that. Or we can take our chances with the guy in his garage paint job.
All this leaves zero options for a "simple paint job" Just lots of frustration.
Okay I'm done.
Good luck Jim70Chevy
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I never said I wasn't willing to pay. Money isn't the option. Finding a shop that is willing to do it is the problem. This is a "simple paint job" for anyone that is a professional painter. It is pretty simple for the amateur. I'm not wanting a tri-coat or anything super complicated. All the tape lines will be there for the two-tone. Epoxy primed, 2K urethane primed and block sanded.
As far as adjusters go, I don't see them snooping around shops much these days. I just went through two claims and I had to do most of the work for them. They never left the office. I had to take photos and get the vehicle to a repair shop for estimates.