So you think it makes no difference to price if the car has paint on or off, eh??
I’ve had a quote from Option 1 to re-paint my Elite, after they inspected it, for ?2700. That is to prepare and paint the car and re-fit the main panels. It is a bare shell, needs only a couple of fibreglass repairs, but of course being Option 1, includes re-tissuing the complete body shell and bolt-on panels. It is completely stripped of paint (properly), but with the headlining to paint on, and the dash, and a silver roof, a bit more complex than an Elan to do. So based on that, your Elan must have been something less than ?2000 to do properly…with the paint on of course.
So they do paint cars that have been stripped by someone else (if it’s done properly), and I think that if you compare what you paid to what they have quoted me, it does make a difference…a large difference. It’s very obvious why, as with my shell, they could see exactly what they were taking on, and could price it accordingly. And they didn’t have many, many hours of paint removal to get to that point.
Their price to re-paint a bare (but still painted) shell is anything between ?5000 and ?10,000, depending on what they find UNDER the paint. It’s an unknown quantity until that paint is removed. If anybody quotes a fixed price for this, then they are pricing in a high rate of rectification assumed to be required…if it’s not, then they will make more on the job. It takes less than 20 hours to re-tissue the shell and panels, once the shell has been repaired, so that doesn’t account for the high cost of work. In fact, it’s cheaper to do that than to repair the gel coat cracks individually in most cases on our 30 to 50 year old cars.
Come on Alex, get real…Stripping and preparing a shell, especially a fibreglass one, is 80% - 90% of the work required. This is not news, it’s been this way forever. If the shell is in very poor condition, as was that Plus 2 in the magazine, then of course the percentage of work to remove the paint drops, and the rectification and prep work rises. As the guys said in the article, they really should have found another shell as the one they did was way beyond economic repair…but it made good reading!
Be assured, my cage isn’t rattled. I will be using Option 1 for painting 3 Lotii over the next couple of years as I respect the work they do. But those 3 will cost the same as one would cost if I presented it to them still painted, because they will have been stripped properly. That’s assuming that the other two are as good as the Elite once stripped of course!
My main point however is that the comments allegedly made by Option 1 and passed on by you Alex are completely out of context and are wrong…the soda blasting did not cause the damage to the shell that they received. It says in the magazine article that THEY (the magazine guys doing the restoration) messed up what was a lousy shell to start with, and the soda blasting actually saved the day by cleaning up the mess that they had created, and revealed the true condition of the original shell, without botch repairs?.then it was delivered to Option 1 in this very sorry state.
The guy who did that soda blasting also runs a business, and has a very good reputation, which he will want to maintain. I don’t know the guy, but the kit he uses is exactly the same as the one I use, as I bought mine from his main competitor when he was closing down…so I know what it can and can’t do. It can’t ruin a good shell, but it can reveal a lousy one.
Mark