Eric,
Your story brings back bad memories. I just put my 64 1500 in the shop for a
new driver paint job. They are taking it down to the metal, replacing rusted
metal and repairing bad body work from the previous goofballs that had a
hand in f-ing up my roadster 20+ years ago before doing everyone the favor
of going out of business. It took 3 shops just to get paint on the car. They
kept going under before they could finish the job. The end result was a
bondo-heavy Shibe job with cheap-assed paint and prep work.
Lesson learned is to never take your car to a body shop that does know how
to do a restoration. The jury is out on this shop. However, they have
several cars in various stages of active restoration and are very
reasonable. The main key to the success of this shop is the fact that they
have a guy that can fabricate and shape metal. This guy says that he can fix
oil-canning hoods and can shrink metal with apparent ease and can hammer out
sheet metal parts from scratch. They have a metal fabrication shop next door
and appear to know their stuff. Their work in progress looks clean. The shop
is clean.
The one thing that I did differently was type out a complete Statement of
Work document with a detailed list of expected repairs, paint
specifications, prices, expected dates of delivery, stages for inspection of
work, risk of loss, insurance, etc. The owner had no problem signing it. I
also call the shop once a week to check on progress and see if they need me
to make any decisions or if they encounter a problem that is outside the
scope of work.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the shop is very likely to come back
for more money if they find a problem that is clearly out-of-scope. NEVER
agree to pay extra for unauthorized work. Especially botched work. Consider
stopping all work until you get a written agreement negotiated and signed.
Another thing to keep in mind is that a professional restoration man can do
the work in a fraction of the time than some snot-nosed dent-puller can do
it with much better results. Based on your writing, your guys had to call in
the experts rather than having "experts" working on your car in the first
place.
I will let you guys know how things go with this shop and post before/after
pictures on the TDROC web site.
BTW, can someone tell me if Miata seats from 1996 + years fit into
roadsters? I'm seriously thinking about pitching the junk 64 seats and going
with the best Miata seats available.
Charlie Hubbard
Webmaster, TDROC
Flower Mound, TX
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