Here’s a Crown Victoria I spotted in Aloha, OR recently:
Not bad from 7 feet away, but here’s what I saw up-close:
The paint looked relatively fresh: less than a year old. When it was delivered to the customer, it was an ALL BLACK car. It probably looked quite good. But it’s falling apart, and here’s why:
- The old paint wasn’t sanded. Some people think cars are taken to bare metal when they’re painted. They’re not. They’re sanded–every square millimeter–then painted over directly. And this is fine, because paint actually sticks very well to sanded, old paint. But that process–sanding every square millimeter, then washing and checking for any spots that were missed–was done sloppily here. In particular the edges where doors meet seals and inserts were ignored. It’s clearly visible on the 2 inch plastic piece a third of the way up the door.
- Trim wasn’t removed. See the paint on the door handle? And that trim piece 6 inches below? Those were supposed to be removed and painted separately. On this car, they were painted together, and the paint is actually filling the seams like glue.
Here’s the real cost. A repaint is going to be 50% more expensive than if it were done right in the first place. Fixing this bad paint job involves completely stripping, then proceeding to the new paint job. Lots of labor hours there.
Ironically, there’s a lot of money doing $500 paint jobs. Hour for hour, they’re pretty profitable. When you’re spending 10% of the time on prep work and using watered-down paint (minimum solids content), there’s good money in doing bad work.
Durable paint isn’t much more. For another $700, this customer could have had something that lasted for years. Inexpensive paint CAN last quite a while, as long as the whole car is scuffed first.