Before I get going on this month’s topic, I wanted to show you a picture. If you get Cruisin News, you may have seen it in the July issue. This is our latest effort at the beginning. It’s a 1954 Hudson Hornet. Pictured, in mid June, with his car is owner Fred. He is seeing his car for the first time although he has owned it for three years. It has undergone a complete mechanical restoration. The motor, simply put, is beautiful. Unfortunately there was no thought about what needed to happen to the rest of the car. So, as soon as we take off all the chrome, stainless and pot metal off the car, it will go to the mechanic to have the motor and everything else in the engine bay pulled out of the car. We will then send it to be stripped. The car is complete with very little rust. But it’s rough and there is a lot of chrome and stainless to be straightened and polished or rechromed. Our current estimate is 150 hours of body work to get this car looking good again. Of course it needs new upholstery, but that will happen after we are done with it.

I guess I need to say this too. Given the nature of the Club, I focus on the old stuff. In fact, it is my passion. However, restorations represent less than 10% of the business. The vast majority of the business is fixing the same cars you see on the road everyday. I can’t begin to count the number of Hondas and Toyotas we have either repaired, painted or both. Lots of Mitsubishis too, because one wholesales was into them. Also in the top ten are Ford and Chevy trucks. The work we do on all thee cars ranges from simply straightening a fender and painting to repairing significant structural damage after a serious collision, e.g. replacing frame rails.

I do the old cars for two basic reasons:
1. I want to.
2. Having beautiful old cars in the lot, gives us a lot of credibility with customers with regular cars. They believe if we work on them, we must be pretty good.

Ok, back to work.

Last month we finished up with the car primed and blocked. So, into the paint booth it goes. Or more accurately, “they” go.

What I mean by “they’ instead of “it”, is if you are really doing it correctly, you are going to paint the car in pieces. Generally we first paint the underside of the hood and deck lid and also the doors, which are off the car. Sometimes there will be other stuff in there such as headlight and tail light bezels, cowls and miscellaneous pieces. After they are painted, the car goes in the booth and the door, trunk and hood jambs are painted. At this time we would also take care of the firewall, inner fenders, etc if we were doing the engine bay. Also we would paint inside the trunk, if we were doing that.

So far, we have sent the car or parts of it through the paint booth at least 2 times; once for pieces and once for jambs. If there are a lot of pieces, we may fill up the booth for a third time.

So now we are ready to put the doors, hood and deck lid back on the car so the entire car can be painted on the outside. You might ask why not simply paint the car with the doors etc on the car. There are several reasons:
1. If the doors etc, are still on the car, you can’t prep them correctly. You can’t get sandpaper everywhere you need to
2.Additionally, by taking the doors, etc of the car, you eliminate any paint lines.
3.Finally, you have full access to all the nooks and crannies and can get paint everywhere it needs to go.

So a car can go through the paint booth 3 or 4 times. Basically, it’s getting painted, in stages of course, for an entire day. The alternative to painting one old car in a day is painting 3, 4, 5 or 6 new cars.

As a body shop owner, what would you rather do, paint one car or paint 6 cars? You might answer, “Well it depends what I am getting for the one car and getting for the 6 cars”. This is true. But in order to “breakeven” you need to get 6 times the revenue. This is tough to do. That’s why most body shops don’t want old cars. It’s just the economics.

We will finish up with paint next time.

Have a question about having your car prepped and painted? Or anything else in that same realm? Email Sam and ask it.

Guest columnist, Sam Hedgpeth, owner
North Highlands Maaco • www.SacAutoBodyShop.com
Email: smhedgpeth@sbcglobal.net or phone: (916) 334-5556

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