i am a PPG certified painter.
to do a PROPER color change. ALL of the exterior parts are removed INCLUDING the glass AND weather-strips. this is a really big job to do this. they also paint the door and trunk jambs. to do this properly you need to remove the doors, hood and trunk lids. the bumpers will also need to be removed..
to paint this color they don't sand the clear coat off. you just sand off the shine and paint over that.
i have painted this color before when the original cars were new. if i recall correctly the paint was $700 a PINT. and it should need about 1 gallon to paint a car. i am sure todays prices are probably 4 or 5 times that. ultra high solids clear coats are about $1000 a GALLON ready to spray. you will need at least 1 gallon to paint a entire car.
to paint this color you have to spray it over a black base. so after sanding the car they will have to put down a couple of coats of black first. this also cost $$$. sand paper, tape, masking paper and sanding pads are needed also. the also cost $$$.
it wouldn't surprise me to hear they will have $8000+ in paint and materials. also time to do the this work is probably about 200 hours @ $70 a hour. the shop i work at charges this.
IMOP $16K for this paint job is actually a decent price for the work done. a decent exterior paint job these days is $10K+.
You took all the words right out of my mouth... I'm no painter, but I've paid enough skilled paint/body men in the past to have a pretty encyclopedic knowledge of what it takes to arrive at a proud result.
Materials costs alone, in today's post-covid world, are absolutely obscene.
I have a 1970 Monte Carlo that I've owned for many years, 29K original-mile car that I bought from the widow of the original owner. Original paint, that when I bought it was like new, flawless. The only bummer (a big bummer) was that when the car was new, the guy had the dealership install side protection moldings... The drill-and-rivet-on style.. They looked like shit, and you couldn't just pull them off like the stick-on style. So I lived with them...
But a year ago or-so, the original lacquer started getting funky on me, as lacquer tends to do with age. It would get blotchy/hazy just sitting inside my air-conditioned building. So I polished it out, it looked new again, and then several weeks later it would start going backwards again. After three fruitless polish jobs, I finally said "f*** it, it's time to remove those moldings and repaint.
So.... Rust-free car, no bodywork other than filling in some tiny holes, NOT a color-change, but did go ahead and refinished all jambs properly, yada yada that was $18 grand. And I did all of the disassembly and re-assembly myself.
Any paint job less than $10K these days, is Earl Scheib territory... LOL
www.rtrvehicles.com
