Quote: Why would you put bondo on top of the original red paint? (inner wheel tubs) In most cases you would want the entire car strip properly before any rust repair is started in my opinion....
Are the areas behind the new 1/4 panel getting any kind of attention?
The B7 Cuda will be well under the $25K max as you said, where will this Bee fall? Still $25K max?
I don't quite understand how installing the new AMD full 1/4 would be the same price (time)as installing/blocking these partial 1/4's
The filler on the inner wheel tubs is over the mini tubs that we made for the car. Yes, it extends out over some red paint but all of that will come off when we get back in there. There is no rust in that area.
Yes, he etched and treated the back of the panels with Sems Weldable Primer before they went on. They will be coated to the owner's specs after installation.
Still well under the $25k MAX. The Hemi is a separate purchase though.
Quarter Panels: We didn't say it took the same amount of time, just that we charged the same amount. Here's the deal. We knew that the quarters had rust in the lower areas and bid the car accordingly. Once we got into it, we found that there was a good deal of other damage as well. At that point, we sent detailed photos to the customer along with options.
1) We can buy some patch panels and butt weld them in. We'll shrink the dents and hammer & dolly as best it can be done. The cost of the parts is $X.
2) We can buy quarter skins and butt weld them in. The cost of the parts is $X more.
3) We can buy full quarters and put them in as the factory would. The cost of the parts is $X more.
The customer did not want multple patches per side on the quarters nor did he see the benefit of paying for full quarters when all of the damage was repaired with the skins. With these skins butt welded and ground on both sides, there will be no sign of them not being original when the car is done. See the lines where they are spliced in and remember that the only fiberglass jelly that will still be there when we finish will be in any pin holes that we didn't see.
The labor on the car is a fixed bid and we would have done whatever the customer wanted us to do without any additional charge.
The only way the price would have gone up is if the customer represented to us that the quarters needed no work and then we later found out that they did. If it had been bad enough, that wouldn't have happened or we would have seen either in the photos or certainly before we started on the car.
Some people might think we're crazy but, in our book, it just wouldn't be right to raise the price just because we did a little extra work for a customer.
Full quarters do take a little more time but, when you've been doing it for over 50 years like Hubert, it's not really that much more time in reality. We don't use book time on anything because we can beat it by a lot, just about 100% of the time.
That's why I didn't respond to the thread before asking how long it takes to put QP's on a Challenger. We're in the business of doing restorations, not just quarter panels.
