Christopher Zach

The problem: 87 944S, Crimson, clearcoat has peeled to the point where it looks like complete dirt.

Problem is the engine is in perfect shape as is the drivetrain. AC even works well. I've owned it for 30+ years and 250k+ miles (and one head, and one broken timing belt, and one broken timing chain, etc)

So now I want to have it painted. Properly painted, all this clearcoat garbage stripped, sanded, and brought back to factory.

But who can do it? Here in MD all shops just want to do insurance work, and it was tough enough to get my 86 928S's hood stripped and repainted (bad previous paint-over).

Is there a magical place where this can be done in the US? Thoughts on finding a good place to do it?

Need to do something about this car, the chipped areas are starting to show surface rust, so it's either fix it or junk the girl.

marc abrams

Happy 4th. Junk a 944 because it needs paint? Sounds a bit extreme. The old girl could at least get a $50 Rust-Oleum paint job.
Anyhow back to your original question. Don't overlook the national wide paint chains. They can do outstanding work, but it won't be at the $999 ambassador paint service price. A friend of mine took his 1940 ford to one of those paint chains 10 years ago. The car needed a lot of body work also. $4000 and two weeks later he was presented with a straight as a arrow, amazingly shiny 1940 Ford. I was blown away by it too. The car still looks great today.

harveyf

If you visit my webpage, you'll see that I paint my project cars myself. Avoids the "insurance work shops". The good news is that if the body is fairly straight (no major dents, etc.) your pending paint job is actually pretty straightforward. I actually would not recommend that you start out thinking about bare metal. You want to preserve the "E coat" (galvanized coating), which you will loose if you insist on a bare metal job. If you go to my website (www.newhillgarage.com) and search on Paint, there are several articles I wrote with the intention of educating folks, even if just to the point of being able to walk into a paint shop knowing the jargon and have a general idea of what is possible. Mark mentions Rustoleum and, yes, there is an article about how I painted my track car with $8 of Rustoleum. But I suspect you want better and a basecoat/clearcoat job will be the type of paint job that most shops will want to quote, and it will stand you in good stead.

I would suggest you google "Finishmasters", which is a jobber for paint products, go visit the one nearest you, ask for the manager, and explain your situation. I suspect they know a large percentage of the painters in their service area because they have the franchise for most of the good paint products like Dupont and BASF/Glasurit. BTW, Glasurit is what your car would have been painted with originally. They will be able to spec the exact color your car came with, if that is important to you. Glasurit is considered to be a high end paint, is very expensive, and probably worth the money from a quality and durability standpoint. I say probably because it may take 25 years to know for sure!

If you live in the DC area, I would suggest at least a phone call to the following places. They may be able to give you a good recommendation.

Monocoque Metalworks
Lippincotts Garage
Autobodystore.com (go to website, get the sales number, call them, ask for Len)

Quality paint jobs are not cheap. The materials cost to paint my 944R was around $2500. And there is a lot of hand labor. Spraying the paint is the easy part! But I think you will be thrilled to give your car a new outlook on life and get it ready for the next 30 years.

Don't worry, the good guys are out there. You just have to find them!

Call me if you like. 919-604-2188

Harvey

V2Rocket

It really depends on the level of finish you are looking for.
There are folks who will say that a "proper" paint job will cost $10k.
Harvey says just the paint etc for his car was $2500.
I got my 944 color-changed and lots of dings fixed for ~$1500 years ago at MAACO.

In my case I wanted the car to be A) one color and B) shiny without orange peel.
It looked GREAT but probably wouldn't have won concours.

931guru

Miracle Auto Body... Their motto is, "If it looks good, it's a Miracle!"

Christopher Zach

Thanks for the starting pointers everyone. The big body problem is that the driver's side door hyperextended once when I was backing it off ramps with the door open and it hooked on my log rack. Tore out the door stay and crumpled the part where the door touches the frame. That and the sunroof edge being crunchy, I guess I could just get a new door and have it installed as well.

Otherwise it's a totally peeled mess. I would want it sanded smooth at least, as the CC is there in parts, not in others, and looks totally terrible. Don't need concours, just something that will remind me of when it was young and not wash off with the next rain....

Any other places between Baltimore and Washington would be good. I have thought about MACCO but I wouldn't mind spending ~5k to do it right. 10k is a bit high, 20-30k is kind of no....

harveyf

Chris, at a minimum all of the clearcoat will have to be sanded off and as a consequence much of the color will be removed and even some primer will be exposed. Not a big deal. At that point, if it were me, I would spray the entire car with an epoxy based pimer/sealer, which will stick to anything and put a nice barrier between the 30 year old paint and your new paint. From there is is pretty straightforward.

Bummer about the door. This represents the kind of stuff that as you get into it, can drive the price up. Painters are good at sanding, masking, and spraying. Anything beyond that just starts to add up to serious money in labor, as you may get out of their comfort zone. There aren't many body shops out there that get to paint 944s and as a consequence, you may get to pay for their learning curve. As a consequence, you can save a lot of money if you can do a lot of the dis-assembly, prep, and re-assembly yourself. It's not a complicated car. You can probably get most of the mechanical prep work done by yourself. The only downside is at some point of no return you are doing things like removing license plates, lights, mirrors, maybe even glass and the car is suddenly not street legal. So it would be helpful if you either have access to a trailer when the time comes to deliver the car.and/or are close enough to flat tow it. But you will save a ton of money at typical paint shop labor rates for every pain in the *** thing that you do yourself to get the car ready for the part they are good at.

Prep items that I would consider doing are:
Remove hatch- detail the black parts, if needed, yourself with matte black rattle can paint
Remove the mirrors- they still might require paint but it is really nice if the new paint can run up under them.
Remove the bumpers- same as with the mirrors
Remove the door handles, door lock cylinders, rear lock cylinder at the hatch. Detail as required yourself.
Remove the Porsche hood ornament
Remove the sunroof seals- replace with new ones after the sunroof is painted
Remove the quarter windows- replace the seals if required
Remove the rear and all parking light assemblies
If it were me, I'd remove the windshield and treat myself to a new one after the paint job is complete. At a minimum, remove the windshield moldings, which are fragile. Repaint them yourself.
I'd remove the air dam and let them paint it separately. It's plastic so gets a slightly different paint treatment.

Get your new door, spend some time hanging it, and hope that the corresponding front fender hasn't also been scrunched. When your're done, make sure it doesn't scrape in any way as you open it or your new paint will be scraped right off.

Consider if you want to remove the rub strips, if you have them. They are just glued on but the painter will incur some time cleaning up the glued on area. So a judgement call on your part.

Assembly
All of the above.
Install the Porsche decals and various vinyl rock shield items yourself. Ask the painter to apply Gravitex or similar to the rockers, before applying color, to get that OEM look (see my 944R article).


You might also consider, if you can find an independent guy to do the job, to pay for all the paint materials yourself. You might want to upgrade the paint quality and/or you protect yourself from cheapo products.

My $2500 is for Glasurit and that should be an upper end number. I don't get any volume discount at the paint store. It can be done for less but if it's a lot less, you're playing with fire. Nason, acquired recently by Dupont, is the lowest grade I would go on paint. At some point, someone may ask you if you want to go single stage instead of clearcoat. Read my articles but in general I think this is an acceptable practice to save some cost. And most of the Porsche non-metallic colors in the 80's were single stage OEM.

It's been 10 years ago but I got a Jaguar XJ6 sedan painted black single stage by an independent guy in Charlotte for $2500 labor, I supplied the paint. It came out fine, very presentable, not concours. So those type of guys are out there.

Good luck.

V2Rocket

Reading Harvey's post reminded me of a fact that greatly contributed to my lower cost and good quality job.
I did all the trim stripping myself. I pulled all the windows, rubber seals, lights, bumpers, etc. I actually drove the car to the paint shop without any windows, sunroof, bumpers, or lights...on a 50F morning

Strike-Force

Where at in the MD area are you? If you don't mind traveling a bit more north to York county PA, there is a Maaco in Hanover that does a bunch of classic car paint.

Christopher Zach

Just south of Baltimore. I took it over to the local Maaco place in Jessup MD, and $1700ish will get the dent fixed, totally sanded, with the base/clearcoat job. Should I pull the rubber from the hatch seals/sunroof, remove the crest, and just let them fix all the other bits?

At this point it's a Why not, worst case it protects the chipping areas before they really start to rust. And it's still winter so they can spare some time to do it right.

AkechiMotors

It's possible to have good work done at Maaco, but it is definitely shop-dependent; look at all the Maacos within the furthest distance you're willing to drive, then check their ratings on Yelp, Google, etc. Some Maacos are actually pretty good, and the idea that Maaco's quality is significantly less than any other regular auto body shop is a misconception. Often the painters who work at Maacos will go the extra mile for an interesting car as it's a nice change of pace from the Civics and Altimas they do all day.

Flinched

Baltimore Body Shop on Sisson Street does decent work. A few enthusiasts work there and always have an interesting project or 2 going on. They're not cheap but not concours restoration expensive either. As others have pointed out, the most important part is body work and prep, most places can shoot a decent paint job.

Christopher Zach

Ok. Aside from the door, there's not a lot of body work to do just really cruddy paint. And if they mess up the door I'll buy one on Ebay and have it resprayed.

Just pulled off the crest (man it is faded, but it's original and kind of the heart of the car) as well as the rear hatch gasket (need to replace anyway), I'll take it over and see what 2k can do :-)

jhowell371

My experience with the local Maaco was less than stellar. The Rabbit Ragtop needed deer collision repairs and decided to have all over paint re-spray so gave Maaco a shot. Buddy used to own a body shop and I've painted airplanes so I'm no stranger to body and paint work. I paid for extra ding repair and bumper prep, that was a joke. Paint was nice and glossy, should have been with all that runny clear coat. I had bigger fish to fry the time and just let it slide having seen the results of trying to fix runs and just making it look worse. Just chalked it up to a lesson learned. One local guy got a great job on his truck, however on a friend's 66 GTO the paint started showing sanding scratch marks from improperly cured primer shrinking. You can't hurry paint work, that said a poor paint job is better than none to save a car from rusting to death. YMMV

Tom R.

What do you want when it is done? A twenty footer? Right now it is a 50/50? Great at 50 feet going by at 50 mph?

The car is not a valuable car. Its intrinsic value exceeds its market value by a multiple. The metallic paint makes things more expensive, and to go solid will turn it into a Frankenstein. Maaco has a few grades of paint last time I checked. If you are going with them, I would see how much you can save by prepping the car as much as you can. pull the rubber off, take out the quarter windows, pull the side moldings off with dental floss. Take the wipers off, bumper pads off, and window sweepers. Door handles are a bitch. Then if you can, sand as much of the rust as you can so they just have to do the fine work. I doubt they will take the windshield out, so there will be overspray on that. However, if it is shot up with pockmarks, you may be able to work something out with a local safelite where they will replace it as soon as the paint is done, then have Maaco pull and toss it. They can do that easily. Notice how the job just got a lot trickier. You may also want to give them the bumpers off the car so they can spray them on a bench and give them back to you in the hatch.
The key to what I just posted is they are sanding and spraying the car. Like all above in the thread said, the details are in the prep. If you have a few small runs, you may be able to say OK. If you have overspray on the door rubber, globs of paint between the door moldings and the door, which leads to a run, and old paint showing through the bumper you will be upset.
With what I suggested (and others give your thoughts), the masking can be done by their intern and there wont be any damage, the assembly will be done by you, and that takes a lot of time. Pay them to do what you cant do, final sanding, and spraying. Use the better paint and get another 30 years out of it.