How To Find A Good Quality Paint Shop

I would recommend local family owned shops with a reputation. The shop I will probably go to has done some really nice cars and my grandfather helped run piping in their place for free. So I'll be able to get a pretty good deal. I already brought my fox over to them and he took a bunch of pictures and said he will get back in touch with an estimate. They just recently did a fox with a color change (door jambs, under hood etc...) and it was around $4,500.

I am staying with black so no color change for me. I do need the door jambs done since there is chipping in those areas.

You could go to maaco and get a paint job for a little less than $1,000 but the headaches they tend to cause aren't worth it. Too many bad threads/reviews lol.

$1200 for mine 2 stage paint job, ...Miracle Glow buford ga. Just fine a small shop somewhere, mom n' pop place. No door jams etc but i kept my original color.

I talked them into figuring in the cost of swapping out my rear 1/4 glass that i had bought, ...whaut whaut

Grabbin' Asphalt said:

$1200 for mine 2 stage paint job, ...Miracle Glow buford ga. Just fine a small shop somewhere, mom n' pop place. No door jams etc but i kept my original color.

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Dang, that's real good and somewhat local.

Grabbin' Asphalt said:

$1200 for mine 2 stage paint job, ...Miracle Glow buford ga. Just fine a small shop somewhere, mom n' pop place. No door jams etc but i kept my original color.

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I hope mine is around 2k since I have bondo near my fuel door. That is the only body damage besides small dents and the drivers side door isn't aligned correctly. I hope the door won't be a major problem. Oh and I need new front and rear bumpers because they are warped

I stripped the car down myself ie: bumpers, windows, trim, lights, seals and it cost me 2700 then I put it back together. I could easily see 4500 smackaroos

There seems to be good places, and you'll probably quickly find out who they are from word of mouth. But they won't be cheap: $7k up. If you want to do it "right" (i.e. for a show car) I think you'll have to pay that kind of money. But that doesn't mean that you can't get a "good" job for around $3k (that seems to be the popular price here in the D.C. area), and I think that this is what most people are looking for from a repaint. Just about every shop you consider will give you an estimate for free.

I looked into this when I wanted to redo my trunk lid, and get some side molding painted. I talked to friends, searched some local forums for experience recommendations, and talked to a whole bunch of body shops. Most of them insisted that I would have to redo my entire car, or it wouldn't look right. That's where I found out about the costs of a complete paint job. The shops that were really well known (i.e. lots of good recommendations) and who kept coming up in conversations were all in the $6-$10k range to repaint the whole car. And honestly, I don't think they were deliberately over charging. They just do higher end work for people who want something different from their car than I was wanting for mine, and that's what they charge.

My criteria were: established shop that had been around for at least 5 years; lifetime warrantee on the paint, good reputation; easy to communicate with; willingness to show me examples of their work; readily available references when I asked; a clean shop when you walked in; and a reasonable price

I ended up finding a local shop to just redo the parts I wanted done and held off on doing a complete repaint. I'm pretty happy with how it came out, and while I had it in there for no extra charge they cleaned up the white top as best they could and polished everything else up (said they buffed the whole car to get some shine back and then used Adam polishes) so that there would be less delta between my shiny newly painted trunk lid and trim molding pieces and the rest of the car. A month later they waxed the newly painted parts, and did everything else again while they were at it. Maybe somewhere down the road I'll do a proper restore on my car, but for the moment I happy that it's at the point where you gotta get up close to see the flaws, and those aren't the parts that got done.

unless its a show car, you will get chips etc on the nose from driving it. no way im paying more than $2000 for a DD IMO

Grabbin' Asphalt said:

unless its a show car, you will get chips etc on the nose from driving it. no way im paying more than $2000 for a DD IMO

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I totally agree.. Even though mine is more a weekend toy I didn't see the need to spend a crazy amount on getting it freshened up.

Around here though, I think the only way you might get a $2000 paint job would be Maaco, the local no-name Chinese auto shop (who might actually good work.. who knows?); or maybe to do all of the trim disassembly and reassembly yourself (a non trivial amount of work). I don't think any decent shop will actually let you do any of the other prep work.

If you are a real hands on guy, have some practice time, & about a weeks time. You could do vinyl wrap yourself. That's what I plan on doing if I can't find a decent cheap paint job. I'm very hard headed though and don't let car stuff beat me haha. Also you can take as long as you want to do it. A body panel a day etc. Just an opinion. Best of luck.

Not hating on Plasti-Dip, but no ha.

I've seen some plasti dip cars that were shedding like a lizard lmao