Macco.. or a real paint shop??

[phil359]

hi Folks....

Need your opinions here if you would please. I have a 72 240z which I brought from a friend a few years back.

When I got the car the carpet was removed, and most of the rear interior was removed by my bud, when he tried to put in a pair of 12 woofers in the side wheel well space. He also installed a 5 point roll bar, and 5 speed tranny.

I've invested some bucks, and have it in as near orginal shape as I would like it to be. I left the roll bar, and tranny, and have replaced a lot of the odds-and -ends that needed to be replace, such as glove box, fuse box... misc stuff.

The body is in pretty good shape, only major rust that I had was behind the wheels in the lower portion of both the drivers, and passengers side front fender. I had a body shop cut out the infected parts, and weld new material in. The engine is still real strong with only about 125,000 miles on it and the body.

The car has been sitting in the garage, and the last 2 summers has been absolutely agony since I haven't been able to drive it while I've been working on it.

My problem is that I need to get a paint job on it now before I can proceed any further on it. The local Macco wanted about 2500 to prep, and shoot the car. A local painter who operates his business out of his garage quoted me 3500-4000. I plan to have all door, and hatch jambs done, as well as under the hood.

What I need to hear from you guy's is do I spend the 4000, or do the Macco routine??? I'm leaning toward the higher end job... but spending twice what I payed for the car just for the paint job.....I don't know...

So what say Ye all ????

Thanks

Phil

[bryantatem]

Paint is one of those things... You get what you pay for. Easy comparison, go to MAACO and lok at a AFTER example of what they just painted and look at the other guy's work. The quality will be there. I always want to see someone else's car after it is done before I get the same done to mine.

[LanceM]

I aggree that you get what you paid for when it comes to paint.

You might want to see if you can get the price cut some if you do some of the prep work yourself. My neighbors run a bodyshop and told me it would cost $800 in materials to repaint my car. That's just paint and tape! So I can believe $3-4K for a total job. Most of the labor is in getting ready for the paint, maybe if you do all of the sanding, cleaning, degreasing and taping off or pulling off the crome and emblems you might save some on the total costs. Of course if you don't do it right and the paint falls off they'll just lay it in your lap as a bad prep job which you did not them....

Macco, Ha I remember an old saying we had for Macco, paints on red, peels off the white!

[tanny]

I just had my 240 painted at MAACO and did a little of the prep work myself. Cost was $600 for urethane paint and $100 of that was for repair of crease in hatch metal. No clear coat. The paint job was not very satisfactory, with plenty of orange peel on all vertical surfaces. What little paint chip repair they did was really poor. The repair looked worse than the paint chip. The top, hood, and hatch came out fine. You definitely get what you pay for. However, The car looks much better than before and the job was adequate for what I wanted. If I did it over again, I would have done 100% of the prep work myself before I took it in to be painted. Victor.

[240Zdragon72]

I would try do it myself. If you knew somewhere that a paintbooth was, I would do the prepwork and the paint myself. I would feel alot better knowing that I did a great job on my car and spared some cash by not paying someone else by the hour that is going to do a half-decent job. Just pay for the paint and time in the booth. Shouldn't take a lot out of your wallet.

Brian:alien:

[Arizona240z]

Stay away from MAACO and the othe production line shops.... I had my first 240 done at Maaco. when I went to pick it up I made them strip it down and repaint it.... orange peel on the sides, a pool of paint on the hood and swirl marks on the hatch (it looked like someone took a dremel to it).

8 months later it looked so crappy I took it to a pro and had it redone, I wasted a tone of money because I took it to MAACO first.

Get a couple of other quotes from some shops. If you have a local Z club, ask the members who they've used, if not find a local car clubs website and ask them.

[ZmeFly]

hell if you just want some new paint on it and you have an earl shiebs around you, you would be better off going to them.

ive seen some horrific paint jobs come out of maaco.

for some reason though people still go to them and they are still in business.

i cant see how since they are one of the worst place to get any real work done to your car. you would be better off in the long run going and getting a quality paint job.

better yet you would be more likely to do a better paint job then them even if you had no experience.

just say no:finger:

[St.stephen]

I agree with everyone else. No Maaco!!! If you don;t want to do it yourself, you could even bring the car down to your local Vo-tech or college and talk to the auto body teacher about maybe having the students do the project. You;d be most likely responsible for materials and such, however you would have the watchful eye of the teacher supervising that the work gets done correctly.

[kmack]

I had no painting experience before I painted my car other than shooting primer, which is hard to mess up.

I bought a $39 Wal-Mart spray gun, 4 in-line moisture filters from Harbor Freight ($6 ea), an air regulator for the spray gun ($6), and all my primer, sealer, and acrylic urethane paint (about $600, the paint alone was just under $200), and rented a spray booth ($35 for 24 hours).

I did all the primer and sealer work, and first coat of paint myself in my garage. Along with the final prep work. The final coat was put on at the spray booth some 30 miles away. Of course I did a final prep at the booth before spraying.

If you have the inclination and want to try something new, do it yourself. You'll do at least as good a job as Maaco if not better for less money. Plus you'll be more critical than Maaco will be of the work, especially the prep. And by all means, use the moisture filters. There is no quicker or easier way to ruin a paint job than to let water get into the air lines.

[kmack]

Here's another picture that shows good reflections.

I have gotten wonderful comments about the paint job. And I get even greater responses when people find out that was my first paint job, ever! Read up on painting. There is lots of info out there. Use it to your advantage to learn something new and save some cash at the same time.

http://www.scottgrundfor.com/pages/collector.html

This website has pretty good info on painting, prepwork, and repairing paint chips.

[2ManyZs]

If the sun was out that day, we would see a "shine" off something else wouldn't we?

Hope you wear your hat on sunny days......:devious:

[kmack]

:tapemouth :tapemouth :tapemouth :tapemouth :tapemouth :tapemouth

So there!