1969 Mustang Paint and body work pricing help

How much will it cost depends on what you are willing to spend. You can get a spray-glo or earl sheib paint job for $500, problem is it's a $500 paint job. Will you be driving the car, showing the car? The more you spend, generally, the better the paint job will be. You are choosing one of the least forgiving paint colors, black. Black will show every defect under the paint unless corrected before hand. That means the body work will cost more also. Most of us in this hobby have seen paint jobs in the tens of thousands of dollars (yup, like $20,000). Unless you have experience in body work and painting cars, leave it to the pro's. Nothing like botching up a patch for the body guy to have to redo at $75/hr.

Nothing saying you can't change out the window channels, or put the trim on yourself after it's painted.

If the factory primer has failed, then you have to go to the metal to eliminate the problem. Most good body shops won't want to paint over anyone else's body work. If it fails, then the paint fails and guess who you'll be mad at? Going Black adds cost as it has to be REALLY straight or it will look bad. You could probably do most of the stripping yourself. One approach is chemical, but some shops won't like that. There are some 3M abrasive wheels that when used with an electric sander will take off paint and leave a nice finish on the metal Check out Eastwood for some ideas. If you were to use chemicals, be cautious about nooks and cranies. By delivering the the vehicle in mostly bare metal, the shop can see exactly what they are dealing with. I have had many shops decline to work on older restorations as they get into problems and the customer gets unhappy because the cost grows. Look for a shop that does a lot of rerstoration work and talk to them about what you can do to reduce cost. If you search on my user name, you can find pics of our '65. we went to a stripped body on dollies and had it media blasted. Ended up replacing a qtr panel and taillight panel after the vehicle was stripped due to excessive damage not visible before stripping. We also had a lot of fiberglass work which adds cost. We had 12K in our paint/body work. Another shop wanted to START at 20K without knowing what was under the paint.

Where in Florida are you?
You can save a lot of money if you take it apart and put it back together yourself. The first thing we do is take a razor blade scraper and see how much paint we can get off but you don't want to strip it to bare metal and have it sit around because here in Florida it will start to rust.

If you want it black, there is no way I'd attempt it, if you want it nice anyways.

10secgoal said:

If you want it black, there is no way I'd attempt it, if you want it nice anyways.

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attempt doing anything to make the cost lower?

he isn't asking if he should paint the car himself. he could strip it of paint, tape stuff off. take off chrome, he could do a lot of little things that will reduce the cost of the overall painting.

unless you think him doing this would in the end run make a black paint job look bad, then i suppose that could be possible if he sanded something too much *shrug*. but as someone else said ask the body shop what you can do that will make their job easier and not harder : ).

I hate these sort of threads. There is no half way on one of these cars.

You want a decent driver paint job for $1000 that will last a couple of years? Take the trim off yourself and have one of those Earl Schieb or One Day places do it.

You want a decent driver paint job for less? You'll have to do it all yourself.

Want a nice paint job for $2500 that will last a lot longer? You'll have to do it all yourself and get your wallet out for better paint materials.

Car Craft had a cover story a couple of months back about DIY'ing a paint job for $900. I think they forgot to mention the booth rental.

I refuse to paint (I can paint, and I have painted in the past) and don't like bodywork. My good guy price is just under $15K - using quality base/clear materials. Somebody will say "that's outrageous" but that's what it costs in California to get somebody to paint your car - it's illegal to paint your own in the So Cal AQMD air basin, althought people do it from time to time.

There is no free lunch when it comes to paint.

the shop that did our '65 does not like chemical stripping. the prefer "media blasting". A word of caution regarding media blasting. You have to find a shop that is use to doing car bodies. If you get the wrong shop, they will warp the metal then you have really serious problems. When you media blast the car, it needs to be disassembled, including the engine etc. otherwise you will have blast media in the engine. I have seen some done with the suspension still in them, however media gets into everything. Also consider what will happen to the interior if left in. Caution is the word here. I have chemically stripped and painted a number of cars, but you have to make sure the surface is extremely clean before painting. As you have stated your not a pro at this. However, first go out and talk to shops about what you can do to reduce costs. One fairly new source of media blasting is "Soda Blasting" This method will not destroy glass and other components that standard media will damage.

1) disassemble as much as possible - how far do you want to go?
2) can you take a lot of the paint off yourself - look at the Eastwood site - they have some items that can really remove paint (also probably your local auto paint supply store can help with this)
3) Black is difficult because the surface has to be really flat or you will get sea sick looking at the waves in the paint. how you get it flat is by priming and block sanding numerous times, applying a "quide coat" and more priming, and block sanding .

On the cars I have done, this process usually takes ~ 100 hours + to do. I have spent as much as 250 hours on one vehicle (41 pontiac) that required basically no metal repair only stripping, priming and block sanding numberous times.

I do not recommend soda blasting if not properly cleaned afterwords the primer will not stick. I use SPI epoxy primer and they say never use SPI epoxy over a soda blasted vehicle or other metal treatments NEVER.