Quote: I think the customer probably received a pretty good value. I know several body shop owners that will do restorations when the business is a little slow. I have seen some shops take up to 4 or 5 years. Anytime you take a car to a shop you never know what you will get back or if the shop even finishes the project. Of course you can spend 50-100k on a restoration but who can afford those? And I don't think Tim is marketing OE Gold restorations. I wonder how many hours Tim and his crew have into this project and. I bet when it is all said and done their shop will be lucky to have earned $50-60/hr.
To get the full picture on this resto, you have to go back a few pages and read forward. The long and the short of it are that the customer had a change of heart when the car was almost done so, we ended up doing a whole lot of work twice.
IMHO, we restored the car twice for far less money than many shops would have charged to do it once. We did more than the customer asked us to do, did our best to troubleshoot problems with other people's parts and work that we had no part of and we think we made the customer happy. We'll see when he gets the car home and does his posting here.
We learned a whole lot on this one and other cars we've done went a lot smoother. Yes, it took much, much longer than it was supposed to but the job changed completely between the start and finish and there were huge delays sometimes in getting correct parts. We make no excuses for working on other cars to pay the bills at times while this one had to sit as a result. I personally believe that there are many shops that would not have kept their word as we did. I've heard a thousand stories about guys having to pick up their cars when shops gave up working on them. That has never happened with us, regardless of the cost, and it never will.
I know that the whole thread is cumbersome, but you can't just read the last part and make judgements. I also know that not everyone will agree but I don't believe that anyone on here or anywhere else would have done the amount of work we did at the level of quality we provided for the price we charged.
$50-$60 per hour? Not even close. Maybe 50-60 Pesos per hour.
Will we still do cars for a $25k MAX? Yes, we're much better at it now!
BUT, we know it will take longer than we want it to. Hubert retired early at only age 71 so he could marry a 40 year old and now uses all of his energy on her.
