Have you been thinking about putting a custom paint job on your car, there are a number of things that you should think about when you go to do it, I’m just going to cover the basic idea, a few things that you should know before you go to the custom paint shop to talk about your custom paint work.

It doesn’t matter what car you own, I’m sure that you’d like it to look great, and to look like it’s one of a kind, your kind, you need to think about the time and expense that it takes to put custom paint on a car, of course it all depends on what kind of custom paint work you’d like done on your car.

I would never try to talk a person out of doing a custom paint job if that what they want, now that we have that out of the way, I will explain a few things, if this is your daily driver that you’d like a custom paint job on, stop and think for a minute, what if the car get slammed in to on the road.

You really need to consider this, because some paints are somewhere near impossible to paint match if the get marred up, candy apple is one of those, allow me to explain how a candy paint is sprayed on a car, during the process after the mask and prep on the car, you’d begin by spraying a sealer, and this is done with all paints.

It differs from other paints in this manor, a regular base coat clear coat paint job would go like this, first you’d spray the sealer, and then wait for thirty minutes, and the you’d come in and mix the color coat, and then lat down three or four coats of color, and then allow a flash of ½ hour, after the flash time you’d go in and spray the four coats of clear, and the base coat clear coat paint is finished, unless your going to cut and buff the finished paint.

For a candy apple paint job you’d get the car prepped and masked, and then clean it and seal it, and then you’d start by laying down a reflective base such as a silver, gold, black, or some other color to create the custom color effect that your looking for, and then you’d lay a transparent color down, like a transparent red if your spraying candy apple red.

This is where things really start to differ, the darker you want the red color to be, the more of the transparent red you’d lay down, so if you remember on the base coat clear coat I said three or four coats of color, but with candy you’d spray the transparent color until you have the desired shade of red that you want, and this is where it can be almost impossible to match after a wreck.

The painter can tell you how many coats of the transparent color that they spray, but the problem lays here, when the candy apple color is manufactured they can’t make it exactly the same every time, so while the painter can tell you that he/she laid down 4 coats of the transparent color, you will never be able to get exactly the same color again, and this would cause a color difference after a repair match.

As far as the clear coat, it is done the exact same way as I described earlier in this article, custom paint jobs are very expensive, and really time consuming, so give some thought to what you want done, and how it would be repaired after the car is wrecked, and it can save a lot of agony for you, and the shop that does the work on your car.

I love custom paint work as much as the next guy, I spray custom paint work all the time, and I know that you have to get what you want when it comes to the look of your car, and I hope this helps you in some small way when it’s time to paint your car.

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I spend a lot of time talking about the restoration of your car, and instructing you how to do it so you can save money, and not have to let your car rot in the elements of the weather, but in this article I’m going to turn the corner, and chat about how you can locate a good shop to do the work for you.

If you’d like to take your car to a shop to get it restored, but you just don’t know where to start, I’m going to try to help you with your hunt for a good classic car restoration shop, and with that we’ll start with the shop’s reputation in the industry, now obviously the shop owner will always brag up his own shop.

So now that you have located a shop, how do you know that they do the kind of high quality work that you want on your car, if your actually at the shop, one of the first things you should do is ask the owner for a list of references of customers that have had classic car restoration work done by them, most reputable shops will be glad to provide you with a list of references.

If the shop doesn’t want to provide you with the list of customer references, that should turn on a big giant red line for you, but references aren’t the whole picture, take a tour of the shop, and look at the work being done at that particular shop, ask the owner if they have ever restored your particular car.

Look at how they keep the shop, is it clean, neat, and tidy, a real shop should always look the part, obviously where their doing work on the cars, the shop will be dirty, and that just means that the restoration shop is busy, this is a sign that they do good work also, usually good shops are always busy, with restoration projects in the shop, and project that are waiting to get in the shop.

Have the owner of the shop show you some pictures of cars that his shop has restored in the past, an owner should be proud of his shop, he should love it, and he should let a potential customer know how proud he is of his shop, and the work that has been done there, but by all rights should not be cocky about it.

The owner should love old cars, and a restoration should not seem like a hardship for him, he should enjoy talking to you about your car, he should be in touch with the car community in his city, he should welcome your business, and love your car, as not just another job, but as if it were his own car, and should pour his shop’s heart and soul in to the car.

Most shops don’t do estimates on restoration work, because they are in business to make money, and promote their shops reputation, in most cases a shop would have you sign a contract to restore your car, and this contract would tell you how payment is expected to be done by you on your car, and what is expected of the shop as far as the restoration of your car.

The contract should cover timely completion of the restoration project, the quality of work that the shop is to perform, it should cover added time for parts locating, if your car is difficult to locate parts for, you should read any contract very carefully before you sign it, if you have questions about it, ask the owner to explain what that area of the contract means.

Remember the contract should cover every aspect of what’s expected of you, and what the shop’s responsibilities are, this will make the entire job go smoother, this way the shop won’t be trying to squeeze you for extra money, and you won’t try to pull the wool over the shop’s eyes, a contract is a good way to do business with respect to a classic car restoration.

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I do believe that I’ll go through how to choose the right car again, I know I have done this before, but I think it’s important enough to get a second time at the bat, in this article I’ll go through the obvious stuff, such as the fact that you should love the car that you restore, it should hold some memory for you.

The most obvious thing when restoring a car, is you should love the car that you are restoring, because it’s a long process, it’s not one of those things that you drop off one day, and pick up the next, you can’t let the time that it takes to restore the car get to you, I would suggest that it would help if that particular car brings back a good memory, like a 1969 camaro does for me.

The next thing is the condition of the car that you’d like to restore, a classic car restoration will obviously take longer if theres a lot to fix on the car that you decide to restore, obviously things change a bit if the car was handed down from your dad, or your grandpa, and it has sentimental value, you can’t just get one that is in better condition, so you need to weigh all of the factors involved.

What to look for when inspecting the condition of the car you’d like to restore, this list will be very basic, I’m not going to go very deep here, a classic car restoration will go a lot better if you inspect the car throughly before you buy it, below I’ll give a bullet list of the hot areas to look at.

• Body inspection: quarter panels for rust, floor boards for rust holes, trunk floors for rust holes, rocker panels for rust holes, engine compartment for rust holes, check entire car for body damage such as dents, wrinkles, and bad repair spots, look for plastic filler, and paint fading or peeling, open the doors and look for them to drop as you open them, this means that the car will need new hinges.
• Mechanical inspection: Start the car and look listen for, rattles, knocks, pings, clicks, clunks, after you listen to the car, look for leaks, oil leaks around the valve covers, oil pan, transmission, and rear end, take it for a drive and look listen for whining, or howling noises coming from the rear end, this is a good sign that the rear end is on it’s way out.
• Electrical Inspection: Start at the front of the car and work your way back, starting at the head lights follow the wiring of the car up looking for, broken wires, wires pulled for the harness, and burned wires, then from there move to the inside of the car and inspect the wiring under the dash, I know that you won’t be able to see it all, but the more you know, the better you’ll be prepared, after that follow the wiring back to the trunk, looking for the same things as above.
• Interior Inspection: Inspect the interior looking the the plastic parts, such as the dash, the heater controls, and the like for cracks, look at the gage panel for scratches fading, and the like, look at the seats and l floors for rips and tares in the fabric, look at the head liner for rips and tares in the fabric, look at the door panels for, rips, tares, bends, and wrinkles, make sure that the door handles are in good shape.

If you do these few things, you’ll get a lot better car to start with, and this will make the entire process go a lot smoother, and better in general, rather you do the work, or a shop does it for you, either way you’ll save yourself time and money just by doing these few things, obviously you’ll get the car for a better price, and the restoration work will take less time, and save you money.

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