Choosing A Paint Shop for Your Classic Car

 

During the process of restoring a classic car or truck, there are a few portions of a build that are more difficult than others.  Taking a vehicle apart, putting it back together and tinkering with the mechanics is something that most people could achieve with the right tools, a little common sense and a bit of mechanical aptitude.

Doing bodywork and painting a vehicle correctly is something totally different.  It takes quite a bit of know-how and talent to make a paint job look picture-perfect.  During a typical restoration, as much as 50% – 60% of the time spent will be working on the bodywork and paint.

Whether your classic needs an entirely new paint job or just part of its color matched, you are going to wat to turn to professionals to get the job done right.  Before we discuss what to look for in a specialist, let’s talk about the cost.

If you are simply wanting a basic paint job, let’s say something less than $15,000, you may as well go to MAACO.  A local collision center body shop may also be able to give you a lower cost paint job but be aware that they often will only take the job as filler work.  That means they will work on your car in their down time when they don’t have any late-model cars with collision damage to repair.  After all, that is how they make the bulk of their money so those take priority, not your classic.

For a high-quality paint job, not show standard but something still impressive, you are looking at an average $15,000 – $20,000 to get the job done right.  Show quality paint jobs usually start around $25,000.  These numbers might sound like a lot, but you once you realize the amount of time and work that goes into it, things start to make more sense. It is a lot of work to completely disassemble the exterior, strip paint down to bare metal, and fix any minor dents and creases.  We aren’t talking about any rust repair or new metal fabrication either.

When you begin your search for the right paint shop, we suggest you start by tracking down some referrals.  Get out to some local car shows.  Find a paint job you think looks impressive and talk to the owner to see where they got the bodywork and paint done. Chances are if it is a local car show, the shop that did the work won’t be too far away.

After finding a few shops to consider, have a look online for reviews and testimonials from others that have had their cars painted.  Apart from online reviews there are also forums you can search for feedback on the shops you have in mind.

Smaller shops are usually the best way to go.  The industrial sized collision centers tend to treat cars like they are just a number.  Smaller shops tend to put more care into their work because the can focus on just a few cars at a time.

You need to investigate the shops in person to make sure you are hiring the right people for the job.  First and foremost, make sure they have their own paint booth.  There are many restoration shops that subcontract paint and sometimes bodywork.  You don’t want to hire them to paint your car for obvious reasons.

Ask to see their paint booth/room and see if it is kept clean.  It is crucial that it is.  A new car finish dries with a slight orange peel, which requires a very clean environment. Dirt and trash in paint requires sanding and buffing, which makes the paint slick and removes the factory matte appearance.

Also take note of what tools they are using for bodywork.  If their tools are dirty and disorganized, you can only imagine how they will treat your vehicle.  If they are drilling holes in fenders and using a slide hammer to remove dents, then you know they are doing things incorrectly.  Ask the shop owner if they use modern dent-pullers and if they have spot-welding equipment, state-of-the-art MIG or TIG welders.  These are the types of tools a true professional will use.

You should also peek around at the other cars and trucks in the shop.  Do they have any other cars you can look at to see the quality of work they perform?  Could you ask the owner to provide some references from past customers?  A quality shop will be happy to provide these.  Make sure you see some examples.  The proof is in the pudding.

If you are getting a partial paint job or want the colors to be OEM specific, you will need an expert to match the paint perfectly.  Especially if older paint will be showing on the car.  It may have faded from its original color and matching that takes real skill!

Most vehicles do have their paint codes attached to the vehicle.  General Motors often attached a plate to the firewall or to the top of the cowl, called a Cowl Data Tag. They have a numeric, alpha, or alphanumeric factory paint code next to the letter PNT on that tag. More often than not, Ford riveted a plate to the driver-side door.  That plate will have a code next to the word PAINT. On Chryslers, there is typically a fender data tag under the hood.  The Chrysler tag may lack a paint code, but a true paint professional will know Mopar cars well enough and know the original paint code.

Paint shops also have other resources to ensure they match the paint correctly.  AutoColorLibrary.com for instance has just about every paint code for every car ever made.  There is also a book titled American Automobile Paint Code Interchange Manual 1945-1995.  In that book is every factory paint code, along with what they call an interchange that’s used to match up factory codes to modern paint colors currently available.

One last piece of advice when hiring someone to paint your classic car and it’s about money again.  Make sure you are not required to put down too much money up front.  There are too many horror stories about people paying huge sums of money to start the project and then the painter takes their sweet time finishing your vehicle.  They will often use the money you gave them to finish another project like a Ponzi scheme.

Work out a fair payment schedule and timeline before ever hiring a shop for bodywork and paint.  30-60 days should be sufficient to do a good job.  90 days if it is a show car paint job.  10-15% down is normal.  You should then be expected to make payments as progress is completed.  Maybe a second payment once the vehicle is stripped.  This is a good time for you to go to the shop and look at your car when it is bare to see all imperfections that will require bodywork.  Once it is prepped for paint another payment can be expected and then the final payment once the paint is completed.

Do yourself a huge favor and really do your homework before you hire a painter.  Paint is too big of an investment to do twice.

Searching for Classic Car Replacement Parts

 

You probably spent a good amount of time and effort searching for just the right classic car or truck to own. Hopefully, you will not have to search high and low for replacement parts. Here is a list of places to look when searching for a replacement part for your classic car or truck.

Part Stores
Even in the modern age of online shopping, classic car part stores still exist. These specialty stores are also going to have knowledgeable staff that can help guide you in the right direction if they do not have the part you need. We suggest making a phone call first to see if they carry what you need. It can save you a trip.

 

Wrecking Services and Salvage Yards
Both of these businesses are an excellent source for finding parts locally. These guys are usually aware of what parts are hard to find or valuable and will have pulled them for resale well before the car reaches the junkyard. Making a few phone calls can yield you the part you are looking for. Situations arise however where you may need to grab your tools and head to the salvage yard yourself to hunt for the part that you need. The challenge with this is that you better know what you are looking for and be able to evaluate the part’s condition. If you have any reluctance, you are better off leaving this to the professionals. 

 

Aftermarket Manufacturers
There are plenty of companies out there that sell knock off replacement parts for classic cars and trucks. The problem sometimes comes down to quality. These parts are sometimes made with less desirable materials and quality than the originals. If you think you can get away with an aftermarket part without compromising the build, then we say go for it. If it must be all original, then keep looking.

 

Car Clubs, Shows and Swap Meets
An event that brings classic car enthusiasts to one place is an excellent opportunity to look and ask for those hard-to-find parts. You may run into a fellow collector with the same car who just might have the part you are looking for. If the car show does not pan out the swap meet will. These traveling car part carnivals are filled with knowledgeable car guys and hard to find parts. Swap meet vendors are not going to bring along a part that can be easily found online. They usually have the rare stuff or at least know where to find it.

 

Magazines
While many magazines are all available online, there is something special about flipping through pages the old-fashioned way. Magazines are a wonderful place to look for new and used replacement parts. As a bonus you are also going to get expert tips and other great reading material as well.

 

Online Forums
Our first online option are Forums. Simply search your vehicle’s make and model with the word forum and you are almost guaranteed to find a forum full of conversations pertaining to your specific vehicle. Forums are not only a wonderful place to ask for parts, but a great resource of experts in case you have any problems with your restoration process.

 

Online Dealers and Auctions
Our last and most obvious resource is the Internet. One search for the part you need, and you are likely to find plenty of websites that will sell and ship it directly to you. One problem with online shopping is that it tends to be the most expensive route. Another common issue is part quality. Be sure to find a website that offers a no hassle return policy in case what they deliver is not what you expected. If you do not have a huge budget and are not pressed for time, we suggest exhausting the options above before searching online. You are likely to get a better deal and learn a thing or two from your fellow enthusiasts and other classic car restoration professionals.

 

Classic Car Autobody Metalwork

 

If a body panel has rust spots but no collision damage, replacing the whole panel may not be necessary. An alternative is to cut out only the rusted area, then make a template, trace it onto sheet metal, cut it out, and weld it in. This is a time-consuming process but having the right tools will save you time (providing that you use them correctly).

What A Body Shop Will Do

If you bring your car to a body shop, they will want to replace the entire panel, regardless of whether it can be repaired. This is simple economics - it is quicker and more cost-effective for them to replace the whole panel. The labor may be less, but overall, you will pay more once you include the cost of the replacement panel. This often puts the repair out of a person's restoration budget.

Provided you are a decent welder, you can save money by cutting out the bad metal, making a patch panel, and welding it in. If you are just getting started with automotive body repair, MIG welding is an excellent choice. They are easiest welding process to learn, and they are also cheapest to buy. Most people can produce quality, good looking welds with minimal practice.

You need to bring the panel down to bare metal. A DA sander works best for this. An angle grinder with a wire brush can also be used.

Before cutting out the rusted metal, take a wire brush and/or scraper and remove any loose rust on the body panel to be worked on. Then take masking tape and mark out about one inch beyond the rusted-through part. You want to remove as little good metal as possible.

Cutting and Removing Rusty Panels

Cutting out damaged metal can be done several ways. An air compressor and cut off wheel is one popular method.

Once the bad metal is cut away, a sander can be used to bring the area down to bare metal.

Sand beyond the rusted area an inch or so. A 36-grit sanding disc works the fastest. Clean the exposed metal area with a 60 or 80-grit disc. You should now have a shiny, solid rust-free surface.

Patch Panel Template

After carefully cutting out all the rusted metal from the panel, the next step is to make a patch template. Take measurements and transfer them to a piece of cardboard (the kind you can cut with a scissor). Draw and cut a template of the patch panel needed.

Start larger than you need. Scribe or mark the cardboard template onto a piece the piece of sheet metal. You can use a black marker to mark the cut, remembering to add about a 1/eighth" or so to the line for trimming.

It is easy to remove metal - much more difficult to add it!

Cutting Sheet Metal

Sheet metal can be cut in a number of ways. Hand-held nibblers and tinsnips work fine for smaller patches, but electric shears will save time on larger patches. Once you have the rough patch cut out, carefully trim it down with hand-held snips.

Stop and check against the car for an exact fit. It is easy to remove metal - much more difficult to add it! You want to end up with a gap of no more than one-eighth".

Welding new metal to old metal is always tricky, especially after grinding the rust off old sections, which thins the metal even more. Burning through the old metal is always a worry.

Best Metal for Patch Panel

You can buy a new piece of sheet metal stock or use an old piece of panel from a donor car, if it is grinded clean and the same thickness.

Curved Patch Panels

Patching into a curved area of the car body will take more time and skill than a simple flat patch. Before cutting out the old metal, study the damaged area and think through the repair process.

You may decide to remove the entire section to make the patch and welding more accessible. Cutting the panel bigger than the damaged area may give you a cleaner and easier butt weld.

Horsepower And Classic Cars Meaning

 

During the time that I have been writing these posts I have received questions that were more general in nature than those that I usually answer. Rather than answer all these similar questions individually, I thought that it would be interesting to more fully explore some of these topics.

This post I am going to take one subject and look at it in more detail than usual. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy it. Depending on your feedback, I might continue this format in the future. This post’s topic is Horsepower.

The ability to move 33,000 pounds one foot in one minute. That is 1 HP. But I do not own any cars that weigh 33,000 pounds. The engine in a 1972 Cougar produces about 163 HP, so some simple math dictates that it should be able to move 5,379,000 pounds one foot in one minute. All my worldly possessions combined, including my house, don’t even come close to weighing over 5 million pounds, and I can’t imagine any situation in which I would need to move them one foot in one minute.

Horsepower is a measurement of work done over a period of time. In fact, the formula is HP = Work/Time. Going back to our original example, 1HP = Move 33,000 lbs. 1 foot (work) /1minute (time).

The amount of horsepower produced by the engines in our cars are measured on an engine dynamometer, but the dynamometer cannot measure horsepower directly. It must first measure torque, and then convert the torque to horsepower using the formula Torque x RPM / 5252 = horsepower. Using this formula, we see that an engine that produces 300 pound-feet of torque at 4000 RPM makes 228 HP, or 300 x 4000 /5252 = 228. Keep in mind that as the RPM changes, so does the torque, and therefore, so does the horsepower. So, it is a little misleading to say that an engine makes 300HP, or 400, or 500. All engines make different amounts of horsepower at different RPMs.

Which leads me to my next point. What does all this mean, and how does it relate to the performance of our classic cars?

I think that most of us understand that, in general, the more horsepower any given car has, the faster it will be. But it is not that simple.

Let us take a make-believe 1970 Camaro with a 300-horsepower engine. Do not forget that it only makes that 300 horsepower at a specific RPM. The RPM at which it makes the three hundred horsepower is dependent on many different variables including, but not limited to the engines bore, stroke, camshaft profile, intake and exhaust design, and compression ratio. The variables are determined by the manufacturer, or engine builder depending on the performance needs.

If the Camaro is going to be raced at a dragstrip, it will need to make as much horsepower as possible very low in the RPM range because the car will be starting from a standstill every time it races. If it will be raced on a road course, the engine will need to be built in such a way as to make the maximum horsepower in the middle and upper RPM ranges because that is where the engine will be operating during most of the race.

Suddenly it becomes apparent that the published horsepower figures that we see really mean very little. A simple graph showing how much horsepower an engine makes as the engines RPM increases would be much more useful, and that is exactly the information that a “dyno chart” provides.

Now that we are all experts on horsepower, forget everything I just told you, because during the time that our classic cars were built, the manufacturers umm…err, fibbed when it was convenient for them.

During the “horsepower wars” of the 1960’s, manufacturers could get higher horsepower figures by stripping the test engines of accessories such as alternators, or even water pumps! The engine only had to run for a short time. This backfired when the insurance companies noticed some very high horsepower figures, and perceiving a higher risk, they charged a higher premium, resulting in decreased sales for the manufacturers. To reverse this loss of sales, the manufacturers went in the opposite direction by under-reporting actual horsepower figures and leaving it up to buyers to look at test reports in the enthusiast magazines of the era. An example of this would be the 1969 Camaro Z-28 or the 1969 Boss 302 Mustang. It is generally accepted that the reported horsepower of both of these engines was grossly underrated at only 290 horsepower.

Finally, in the early 1970s the SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) stepped in with standardized test procedures and horsepower ratings were more consistent.

So, what does all this mean? Nothing. Unless you are a professional racer or engine builder because you cannot really feel horsepower. The force that pushes you back in your seat when you step on the gas pedal is the “torque” that the engine produces. But that is a story for another day.