Cost of a bare metal resto

if u spent 3 .5 on the job and it wasn t up to your standard , what ever that is , u would be on here crying your lights out , so if in doubt don,t. buy cause you cant afford to , but u could afford to buy in america import pay duty , but not to pay to do the work ?????????????????????????????????????????????????? owen nw

 

In labour alone

 

Any old vehicle is never worth what you put into it

 

Less than ten k if its not to the buyers taste

 

I know some people who have had good work done at astonishingly low prices, so sometimes you can get lucky. But £3.5k does seem very low for a full inside and out bare metal paintjob. Paint alone will come to over £1k if you are using 2 pack from a high quality company (Glasurit, Standox, Spies Hecker etc.). Good places will also factor in what is likely to come to light once you bare metal it as well - fillered dents, hidden little bits of rust, dried out seam sealer that needs raking out, cleaning up and re-doing etc. Even really good buses will throw up some surprises once in the nude!

Of all the types of work, paint is the most difficult to get right I reckon. Anyone can make a vehicle look brilliant the day you pick it up. But what makes it last is painstaking preparation, things like acid rinsing and wire wooling panels before priming. Prep takes hours and it's invisible to the customer. Search out those whose work still looks good 5 years later. Sadly, there aren't that many of them.

As for value at the end, are you intending to sell soon? You'll never get back the cost of properly restoring a vehicle, unless values of that model go through a crazy inflation phase, and that's already happened for vans. But most people don't get back a fraction of what they spend on their modern cars, so what's different?

 

You've just made more seance than most of the other replies on here ,think this place is full of bored sarcastic no it all but no nowt types , after all I thought owning a camper was about having a passion for it not who's spent the most money doing it up,yes there are plenty of people out there with the money to spend 10k on a resto , but there's also a lot of people who haven't got that to throw at there's too , mine is about a passion and a boyhood dream of owning one of these iconic buses ,I don't want to stand it in a show ring and take a trophy home at the end of the day , thanks Dave

 

So you think the opinions of several people who do this for a living are useless tripe. Quite right - you go ahead and listen to people who give the answer you want. Here you go:

Go for it mate, sounds like a fair price - the problem is those £10K estimates are £8k profit for a week's work. Scene tax or what!

Happy now?

 

You two beat me to it - but I was going to gentler

Expert advice - a bit of humour. I'd be reading this and taking it all in.

 

One thing I do know about painters is that they mostly have their eye purely on producing a nice surface to paint on then painting it. The ones I know personally HATE welding and grinding - for one thing it makes a mess which is not what a painter wants. They tend to look the other way when they find pitted rust believing this is not their problem which is true. They will fill small dings and dents, but they won't be making wobbly panels flat. Imagine you are a painter and you have to spend extra days dealing with such things. This is not painting. IMO it's sensible to get someone who likes and takes pride in the grinding and welding bit to do this and get the filler to say 120 grit. Then another job starts - surface prep and painting.

We had 2 auto painters on my site. One was cheap but could produce a mirror finish straight from the gun. Sadly he had people coming back time and again after pressure washing their paint off or he has painted over dirt in the corners etc. I tried him once on a top half only job and had to take it back 3 times. He's moved on to start again with a new local clientel. The other was and still is 2-3x the price and his finish isn't quite so good TBH, but if he rolls it out and isn't perfectly happy, he pushes it back in and does it again without even mentioning it until you catch him doing it again. he NEVER has any returns.

Another good way forward if you're not in a hurry is to find a very big auto painters with maybe 6-10 employees who when they have any quieter moments need something to do. I've done this once with excellent results, but it took them 18 months of constant nagging to get it all finished.

I hope that helps, that's from my own experience of painter behaviour.

 

agree with @zed's above comment.

You might get someone to baremetal it for 3.5k, but the chances are that he's desperate for work or just starting up and working for £5per hr. There's no way you do all that work for 3.5k on a wage of £30 per hr, which is still dirt cheap for a bodyshop. That doesn't mean it won't be a good job, but he won't have the capacity for anything to go wrong for that price. The people use do it for about 4.5k, but I do all the strip and refit and any welding work, so you'd be looking at more like 6k just for a respray without any welding.

 

Thanks zed ,I do listen to all the advice especially from people who tend to know what there talking about ,I've had some very good advice on here for other things , I am being very carefully with who I let do the work ,I've not gave the job to anyone as yet , but I did get the price off two local places that restore classic vehicles and have done several campers , mine is very solid taxed and motd only a couple of small welding jobs needed, but like you say when it's bare mite show up a few surprises , thanks again PaulPaul

 

The two places I've taken it to for prices are both established paint shops both seem to no there stuff and where to look ,there's about a days welding needed just three small bits , it will all be striped down they'll just need to knife the windows out and slide the front seats out then it's all there's thank you Paul

 

Get them to take pics for your peace of mind and fingers crossed no nasty surprises.

 

I'm bored so thought I'd chip in, I think you need to find a couple of buses with awesome show standard paintjobs and ask their owners what they paid...

I doubt you'll get a straight answer...which should lead you to think that good bodywork is not cheap,

Take a look at some of the resto threads on here, bare metalling a bus is expensive and time consuming, and if starting with a good base van not necessary, and my bet is that the quotes you've had will be based on bare metalling just locally repaired areas if you're lucky.

Is your bus for sale yet?

 

There are no gaurantees with painters,, I have seen an XK 120 go from a resto shop to the coachworks for a pro job..

Before it left the restorer It was easy to see the repair to the lower front section of the wing, a common repair for XK120s , It wasnt essentially a bad repair but it was notieable by eyeand you wouldnt have to run your hand over it to convince yourself..Un fortunately it had been mig welded so there was no ammount of planishing the weld would have smoothed things out ... But apparently that was it ready to go for body prep.

I kept an interested eye on the progress of the car and several visits to the coach works revealed there practice of applying filler to smooth stuff out.. Im not talking about a skim to wash out mild ripples or file marks, but generous applications to smooth out bad repairs .

After several months the car was eventually painted black.

Cost of the job £12,000

I saw it back in the resto shop and they were bigging it up but to be brutally honest it weas easy to rip it to shreds , there was some dirt in the job, not a lot say half a dozen bits here and there, a few dryish lower edges, dry door frames, etc. It was also obvious, to me anyway that the front wings were "wavy" and not arrow straight and you could still see the transition between the upper and lower wing repair.

The car then sat in the resto companys workshop having some detailing to the engine interior etc In the interim 6 months, microblisters appeared on the roof and door tops and some other areas started to shrink.. needless to say it had to go back, but it had have the interior removed engine out etc etc

Just to show that even 5 figure jobs dont always turn out well.

The moral of the whole exercise is, you pay your money and you takes your chance ...

Have a look at the jobs they are currently working on, check out there repair work, how clean is the place, I find if the shop is tidy its often a measure of the habbits of the workforce. and last but not least find a job they have completed and have a good look over it and find out from the customer if there had been any hidden cost..

BUT also be realistic. Its ok to be fussy but some people rip the backside out of it, For £8k upward your justified to crit some bad work, being more fussy as the price increases, but for less than £8k take a deep breath and look over your shiny van with a degree of realism, expect some minor blemishes, and expect more as the price decreases...

HOWEVER, some of the Polish body and paint fellas are blooming wizzards and can turn out really good work at a quick turnaround for a decent price.. and thats all your looking for really, since the rust never sleeps on these vans...

Thats my ten bobs worth

 

Thanks buddy , I no exactly what your saying there I'm in the building trade and see lots of bodged up jobs that people are paying top dollar for , I myself believe in doing it rite and taking my time to do plenty of prep work the rite way ,and leave a job i would be happy with in my house , I work for a large company who charge mega money for the work I do , but I also do the same work for myself at a fraction of the company rates same job same bloke but cheaper I just need to find someone like me who gives attention to detail for the rite price , I will check these guys out before I go with either of them thanks again buddy

 

Totally agree with zed that you need someone keen on bodywork before handing it to a painter. I also agree with what some others have said about there being no need to go back to bare metal all over - with my van I had it bare metalled in all the places that rot: sills, arches, rear corners, complete front panel, gutters, door bottoms and window frames. That revealed anything nasty: the doors all had to go, there were a couple of small previous repairs that needed re-doing properly and a rear quarter that had been warped by a tiny welded patch and then been filled with loads of plod, a real shame as it then needed the whole panel replaced.

Where no filler or rust emerged though, the paint beyond those areas was left and just flatted back to factory paint, as that is very good. You'll be hard pressed to match the adherence of factory paint, even with modern etch primers. It still wasn't cheap, but at least it saved the labour for areas that needed it.

 

Good post

Bare metal respray is a buzz word nowadays
These old busses were sank in a vat of primer then pulled back out when they were new
Once you take them down to bare metal they start the corrosion process and this continues

Id say good quality and attention with cavity wax after repairs is more important than taking a bus back to bare metal
All repairs rot first at the welded joins on the back of the panels