[mattmcginn]

Hey Jeff-I am speaking of course from my experience. We're kind of a smallish boutique shop who does a lot of work for the vintage BMW crowd here in the snowy NE with of lots of rusty 70's junkers crossing our path.

To point, I usually I dont mind if my customers disassemble/reassemble their cars on their own because it can bring great pride to build their own cars and this only reflects on what we did to build the foundation.

If based upon a figure of 80 or so hours at a shop labor rate of $100 per hour (which I wish I actually billed per real man hour worked as I could pay all my guys what I would like) and 80 hours spent on a "paint job" then that does not allocate for paint and materials much.

Above and beyond the usual help/employment issues any business has to deal with are the myriad problems that any resto shop has to deal with (not singing the blues of course) are previous junky paint jobs with poor adhesion, substrate compatibility problems, etc.

These problems can be very difficult to estimate from a shop that has pride in work, doing work for a customer who demands perfection (and who dreads said pissed off customer 2/3/4/ [whatever] years down the road without really molesting a customer's car. so in my book"estimates" can be pretty much useless until othe car is really looked at a bit to see what lurking problems may occur.

I would love to be able to do a "windows out, lids-off" type paint job in that amount of time for that amount of money! Life would be a bit easier I guess! Working toward a desired result rather than a budget is very tough stuff!