|
RESTORATION PROJECT TIPS
Four ways ensure a better restoration before you start
By Barry Kluczyk based on a story previously seen in Musclecar Enthusiast
Nyle Wing, the owner of Michigan-based Wing’s Auto Art (wingsautoart.com), has been restoring muscle cars for 20 years. His roster of jobs includes some of the rarest cars ever to come out of Detroit, with many taking top awards once their proud owners begin showing them off.
Recently,
a new customer brought him a GTO that was fresh from another
resto shop. As full restorations go, the price the customer
paid seemed to be a comparative bargain, but he soon learned
the hard way what is meant by the axiom “you get what
you pay for.
”At a glance, the car looked fine, but upon closer inspection,
the underlying bodywork was terrible and other details were
just plain wrong. By the time the owner tried to do something
about it, the shady resto shop had closed its doors. The car
owner was out some serious money and saddled with a GTO that
simply wasn’t up to snuff. Exasperated, he brought the
car to Wing’s shop, where his crew will do what they can
to fix the other shop’s mistakes. It will be a costly
adventure for the understandably frustrated owner.
Unfortunately, that enthusiast’s experience is all too
common. The good word of a smooth-talking shop owner should
never be enough to win the business of your restoration investment.
“Just like a big medical procedure, you definitely want
a second opinion,” says Wing. “You can’t just
take the shop owner’s word for it – you’ve
got to get the opinions from others who’ve had cars restored
at the shop.”
And while nobody wants to spend more than is necessary, Wing
advises those contemplating a full, concours-style resto should
be prepared for a sizeable bill. The cost boils down to time,
because that’s what the shop is charging for. A body-on
paint job and no additional work may take a few weeks, but the
painstaking disassembly, reconditioning and reassembly procedures
that comprise a concours-level restoration – those typically
involving stripping the car to its sheet metal shell and mounting
it on a rotisserie – take many months.
“To do a car to the first-class, concours-ready quality
most people want these days takes about 1,500-2,000 labor hours,
with maybe a year or so in the shop,” he says. “Anybody
who says they can do it for, say, half that, is cutting corners
or not giving the full treatment to your car.”
Most shops charge anywhere from $60 to $85 per hour –
or more – and that doesn’t include the cost of parts.
Do the math – and be prepared to pay in installments as
the work progresses.
There are other considerations that first-timers should weigh
before handing over the keys and a sizeable chunk of their savings
to a resto shop. Here are four of the most important:
1. Decide whether you want a show car or a driver
“I hear it all the time from new customers who initially
tell us they want a nice car, but not necessarily a concours
car – then they change their mind halfway through the
process and it costs them even more, because we have re-do things,”
says Wing. His advice: Be honest with yourself before you drop
the car off at the shop.
“For a driver-quality car, we can simply powder-coat a
lot of the chassis and suspension parts, rather than priming
and painting them to concours quality. It takes less time, so
it costs less,” he says. “The really expensive part
comes if you later decide that you want to win a Best in Show
trophy, because we’ve already done the job one way and
then we go back and do it another.”
2. Restored or over-restored?
A car restored to concours quality, using the best methods and
priming/painting techniques on the chassis, would still show
production-line imperfections unless you decide to correct them.
That includes things like notoriously imperfect gaps between
body panels, visible stamping and pinch-weld sheet metal distortions,
less-than-perfect alignment of trim pieces and paint with visible
orange peel. “These cars just weren’t built with
the attention to detail seen in the new cars of today,”
says Wing.
Again, time is involved in improving the fit and finish of a
vehicle over the factory standards. If you want a perfect-looking
muscle car, it will cost more.
3. Be prepared for surprises
A 40-year-old muscle car can hold many secrets beneath its skin
– everything from previous accident repairs to rust that
was unseen prior to disassembly. Wing says he warns his customers
to expect the unexpected as the car is torn down.
“Many rusted-out parts of a car are located in areas that
are difficult to see until the car is disassembled,” he
says. “In fact, many cars thought of as rust-free can
hide some nasty surprises. A good shop will take that into account
on their estimate, but we are constantly surprised at the things
we find that weren’t planned for.”
4. Find your own parts
The more time the shop spends searching for NOS hose clamps
and radio knobs, the more it’s going to cost you. Let
the shop spend its time block-sanding the body, while you spend
your lunch hour on eBay or the OPGI Web site scanning for the
elusive parts. Also, when it comes to used original parts, you
are the ultimate judge on whether a part’s condition is
satisfactory, so don’t leave it up to the shop.
“If you go into the project thinking you’ll make
money, you’ll probably be disappointed,” says Wing.
“The simple truth is most cars aren’t worth what
a full restoration costs.”
In other words, do the resto because it’s your dream car,
not because you’ll make a small fortune on it. You won’t.
|
End of Year Sale!