Man am I getting sticker shock! My pretty straight car is getting estimates in the 5-9k area! Jean and others, this is for a two stage dupont job. Three layers of clear, color sanded back to two layers. Is this an expensive process? Or am I jus being cheap? Scott
If your car is pretty straight and requires very little body work (few minor dings) I would expect to see something in the way of $3000 - $3500 up here in Canada for a decent job and that would include removing necessary parts for paint and in base clear. Of course you will be paying more the further down the vehicle is stripped or depending on how straight you want it, but for a basic, clean, respectable driver these quotes seem way out to lunch. Up here, we charge 50% of the actual paint time for color sanding so you could add that to my price and get somewhere in the $4500 - $5000 range but I would expect one heck of a driver paint job for that price. Anything more on top of that would be getting into show quality, and who wants to drive a vehicle at that point and risk getting the first ding or chip? Not for me! JM .
Color sanding adds alot of extra man hours ... it definitely makes for a nicer looking car but it will cost you ...
We all know paint isn't cheap and neither is labor. You have to talk to a lot of people to find the right paint job that fits a $/quality ratio you can live with. Much of the paintjob isn't the application of the paint but the quality of body/prep work underneath and their ability to sand and buff. All of which are very time consuming = $$$$. My experience is that better paint jobs cost more. I would hate to shell out $3000 for a paint job and be barely satisfied if I could have been truly happy with a job that cost $5000 to start with. Your $3000 job could end up costing $8000 or more by the time you get what you want. Interview painters and be very direct about what you expect and they will usually be direct about what you will have to spend to get there. There is always the option of doing it yourself. Save $$$ and get more attatched to your car too.
Wet sanding the newly painted car to remove dust nibs and orange peel(texture of the paint surface). Followed by buffing, making for an almost glass smooth finish.
Hmmmm .... I thought color sanding was wetsanding the basecoat before applying the clearcoat. Without color sanding ... any sort of orange peel or imperfection in your base coast will be enhanced by the clear. Not matter how much buffing you do to the clear the imperfections and orange peel wll always remain in the base coat. By color sanding you have to perfect layers of paint ... base and clear ... I have a $4,000 paint job on my Grabber ... That included lots of prep to smooth all my panels and 2-stage color. I did all dissassembly and reassembly except hanging the doors and fenders. I applied my own stripes. I personally think my paint looks awesome and it was not color sanded. A carefull eye can see the slightest amount of orange peel in the base ... but you gotta be looking. A color sanded car ... no matter how hard you look ... is gonna be mirror smooth .. Edit: Never mind ... looks like GunSlinger is correct ... color sanding is sanding the clear ... should be clear sanding not color sanding! ..
I may have been wrong in the definition, but that's what I've always heard. I know what you're talking about with seeing the base-peel, but you have to look pretty close to see it, but the clear can still be smooth. I personally like single stage paint(solid colors) with a coat or two of clear on it. The single stage looks like more pure colors than the base eqivalent.
The paint system in the bodyshop that I used did not have a 2-stage formula for 1971 Ford Bright Red color code 3 ... only single stage. I was there when he mixed the paint and he showed me how he converted the single stage formula to a base coat formula... but I don't remember what he did different ...
Sikkens has a single stage converter for ABP, to change base to single stage, but that alters the color a little bit, so we don't really use that too much, just for cutting it parts, and so on. What brand of paint was that??
I don't recall the name ... I know it was either German or European ... not Sikkens, PPG, Dupont, etc .... Did you mean changing base to single-stage or single-stage to base? They converted single-stage to base ..
Dan, was your paint a different hue than mine? Mine was painted with 4 coats of DuPont base and 3 coats of ChromaClear. No color sanding and no buffing. Seth
dmhines, seth, you guys who have a nice paint job already, did you strip it to bare metal, or just sand what you had, and then resquirt?
