We’ve all heard the old standard “you get what you pay for.” Here at Sound Classics we’re using our 1979 Chevrolet K10 4X4 pickup as the guinea pig in testing if you can get more than you pay for with a cheap paint job—if you’re willing to do some prep work yourself.
The last installment detailed the four arm-wrecking days of sanding, Bondo, more sanding, priming, and more sanding on our 1979 Chevrolet K10 4X4 pickup. With this done it was time to hand it off to a cheap painter. Seeing an advertisement in the newspaper for a $199 special deal at Maaco in Lacey, we had our place.
As readers might recall, we already did a mock-up of how we wanted the truck to look. We printed out the “Sound Classics Virtual Paint Booth” (actually nothing more than a photo-chop) comp of the truck in black and silver and gave to the quote manager at Maaco.
Maaco’s $199 special is for a spray of standard single-stage paint. Trucks cost $50 more. Two colors doubles the price, including the truck fee. Want primer and extra prep, like block sanding? That adds $149, but is well worth it. The bottom-line quote for painting: $730, which sounds expensive until you visit a paint supply shop and find out what paint actually costs these days.
We brought paint books into the sunlight to select our final codes. Then we signed numerous sheets authorizing work, including a page-long disclaimer describing that Maaco is a “production” facility, and that our $730 wouldn’t net a “show finish.” With the last John Hancock, the keys were tossed.
A week went by and the Chevy was ready. Upon first gaze of the finished product, we were awe-struck by how similar the vehicle looked compared to our Virtual Paint Booth rendering. That’s a good thing, because it was exactly what we wanted.
Well, almost exactly. To our surprise the truck bed wasn’t prepped or painted. Evidently most paint shops no longer paint beds, because most owners now opt for a professional spray-on bed liner instead of paying Maaco’s $150 additional fee for painting the bed. Wish they would have told us that bed-painting wasn’t included, rather than assuming we already knew that piece of trivia.
Given our lack of previous body and prep experience and Maaco’s production-line painting, the truck came out pretty darn well. The only bad runs fell on the tailgate’s “CHEVROLET” stamping, but this is covered by the Silverado package’s metal trim plate. Small waves also present themselves during close scrutiny under direct lighting conditions. Finally, a mist of light silver overspray from the center appears in areas of black, but this is nothing thirty minutes with a random orbital polisher and a bottle of Griot’s Garage Machine Polish #3 can’t fix.
The worst view is of the cab’s roof, which was never block sanded. Luckily, one would have to be eight or ten feet above the truck to notice the paint waves. We really have to take the blame for this, since our prep on the roof wasn’t exactly up to snuff.
With the majority of the trim back on the truck, it looks pretty slick (in our humble opinion.) There’s no doubt that this isn’t a $15,000 paint job, but spending that type of scratch on the sub-$1000 K10 would be like replacing great-grandpa’s Mercury Grand Marquis drive-to-the-supermarket ride with a Ferrari 599 GTB.
We’ve had cars painted for $1500, $3000, $5000…and even a no-cost-spared body restoration of the Ferrari 328 GTS, so what do we think about the various price-value ratios? For $730 we received a good value for the basics. We gave up details like painting the bed, door sills and the engine bay…plus there will inevitably be areas that aren’t perfect (like the top), but we could crash a show and shine with the K10 and not apologize.
The $1500-$5000 range is a total crap shoot. At this level details like entire-vehicle block sanding and sills/trunk are in play, but skill, equipment and paint choice also are important to the results. This last $730 Maaco job has less dust bumps on the surface than the $3000 three-month complete body restoration job we contracted last year for a 1929 Franklin.
If you’re going high end, as long as you pick the right shop, you get the intended results. Speaking of the right shop, we took the K10 down to Hoey’s Autobody—the best shop in the area. They not only repainted the Sound Classics 328 GTS three years ago, but also have a Best In Show trophy from Monterey’s Concorso Italiano for the shop owner’s personal 1967 Lamborghini Miura as proof of their restoration prowess.
Hoey’s chief body man was actually surprised with the results for the price—expecting far more runs, waves, blotches, and overspray. It certainly doesn’t match the quality of detail we would have gotten from Hoey’s (one look at the miles of wave-free deep, glossy black paint on the trunk of the 1959 Impala they were completing illustrates this), but we did get what we paid for…and maybe more due to our four days of prep.
Think of the K10 now like that seemingly hot girl late at night during the kegger. The truck is now a “10-10-3-3-3-10” – looking like a 10 from 10 feet at 3AM…but a 3 from 3 feet at 10AM! Either way, it’s better than the solid 1 we came into the party with!
All that’s left to do is the interior. With a new dashpad and seat upholstery sitting in the garage, the K10 will be completed in a day or two!
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