Yes, If it's a solid color. If you try to color sand a metallic color you'll run into problems because of the metallic flakes.
well that maaco job on that mustang is pretty sweet. It looks great. Did you guys do a lot of the prep work? was it a repaint?
I wet sand and buff all the restos I do. On average I charge between $1800 to $2500 to do this over the price of the paint job. It takes at least 4 days when the paint is fresh(I sand it the next day)If you leave it a couple of weeks or longer it is like sanding concrete and even harder to buff up.
Oh yeh, as for the maaco question,don't be to fussy on a $300 dollar paint job. You get what you pay for . If you plan on restoring the car down the road you will have to strip off their crappy paint which makes for more work for the bodyman(more $$$$).
This is what the car looked like prior to repaint. The body was pretty straight to begin with, only thin I really did was replace the front fenders and hood because the car had been in a couple of minor fender benders. Other then that it was just some filling and sanding some little dings here and there, and then we dropped it off at Maaco. It may have helped that the shop that did it had been open for many years, and their certification was running out. They used this car to be inspected to renew their certification, so it wouldn't surprise me if they went a little beyond what they usually would on it to make sure it was right.
herd from my dad its bad today.....said his buddy was going down the road after having his hood painted and the paint went flying off as ONE piece while he was crusin down the road lol
That's not the 1st time I have heard of this happening. And you certainly don't want to take one of these paintjobs thru one of the high pressure car washes...same results.
Several years ago we restored a '72 Chevelle for a guy. The car had been repainted green at one time and the paint was peeling pretty bad. When I tried to sand it the paint kept chipping back and it would not feather out. On a hunch I picked up the airhose and directed a high pressured stream of air on the hood. The clear and paint literaly blew off in sheets. I was able to remove ALL the paint on the car with a razor blade scrapper. In the process I noticed the clear coat was not actually clear, but was instead intergrated with the green basecoat. When swept up it looked like a big pile of green cellophane. We needed to remove the wheels and while looking for the 'key' to unlock the locking lugnuts I found something that explained everything. The car had been painted at MAACO. The customer's copy of the work order was still in the glove box. What really got me was the car was painted at the same MACCO I had worked for at the same time I had been working there. My old Managers signiture was on the work order. I had masked that car up for paint years earlier but I no longer remembered it. I read on the work order what the guy had paid to have done to the car and compared it to the work that had actually been done. The guy had paid to have the rust holes repaired with new metal; something we called a Cut & Weld. Instead the rust holes were loaded up with bondo which was bubbling back out. No welding had ever been done. The dents that were supposed to pulled out were just ground down and loaded up with bondo. The guy had paid for a " Full Clear Coat Finish with UV Protection" which was an extra cost procedure. Instead of a full clearcoat, the painter had taken a small amount of clear and mixed it into the last coat of basecoat. The car's owner never knew that he had paid for work that was never done and that he had been royally ripped off. I was so embarrassed that I wanted to crawl under a rock, but was also p*ssed that the shop I had worked for had been ripping off thier customers that way. Just seeing what had been done to that car made me so glad I no longer worked for MAACO anymore.
from all the things I've heard over time, you just have to get really lucky with a maaco paint job. And at $2K I don't think it's worth risking it. But maybe finding a really good painter at maaco and maybe getting him to paint the car property on his own time might be worthwhile.
Sometimes you can get bodymen/painters to work on their own time,but after doing it all day most don't want to.Don't expect it to be for free or for a case of beer, as this is my experience in the past. I have to tell people that I don't need the practice anymore.
Agreed. I don't personally do all the work on the cars in my shop everyday but just being involved in the production of it makes me not want to even see anybody elses car after hours. And I do get requests all the time to do side work. Sometimes it's hard to get myself motivated to even work on my own car after hours. I just tell them I would be happy to work on their car for them...as soon as I get finished with mine. Of course I figure I have about 3-4 years worth of work to do on the two cars I have left to do.
