Well my sons car, a 2006 Mustang was hammered back in the spring by a passing hail storm again. I had it fixed 2 year prior for the same thing only not near as bad. This time the aluminum hood had about 19 pretty deep dents that my PDR guy couldn't mess with as it is aluminum. I feel sorry for the new F150 owners with all aluminum bodies. What was explained to me was aluminum has no memory and is very hard to work with. So I asked him to fix the 50ish hail dents scattered around the body and leave the hood alone. In addition, my son had pulled over a concrete parking stop and as he backed out, it got hung up and split the bumper cover on the left side and left a 10 inch crack.

I pondered buying a used hood, with repainting about $800. A new hood with repainting was about the same. Being the cheap bastard that I am, I decided to repair the one on the car. This was my first foray into a paint and body repair. I bought a cheap plastic welder to repair the bumper, cost $22 through Amazon which is basically a glorified soldering iron with a wide triangular tip. The crack repair took a few hours and a few tips off of Youtube were very helpful. Used some body filler made for bumpers and as luck would have it was also good for aluminum. After about 4 days of filling, sanding, priming and painting, I was done. I learned a few things along the way for my next foray from a few friends through this process. It came out pretty nice with a bit of minor zebra striping in the paint. It wasn't bad enough to have to redo it, looks perfect from about 5 ft. All in all it cost about $350 in material and paint.

Anyway, I can see why even inexpensive paint jobs are so expensive as they are very labor intensive.

 

Well that is a great feel good story wish i could do that.Thanks for sharing that with us.Now if i had a paintless dent repair for a 1967 442 hood hail damaged hood not major deep dents see thread in body work.Anyway congrats Eric on your repair job.

 

Hopefully nothing will fall out if he hits a pothole. Looks as good as new to me good work....Tedd

 

This has been a great first car for a teen. Insurance is inexpensive and mechanically its held up nicely. Its been through 1 year of HS and 4 years of college. I spent about a week refurbing the car inside and out, it looks almost as nice as it did when I bought it. Hopefully he can get another 5 years out of it as it only has 60k miles on it.

 

i remember about 20 yrs ago we complained if we had over $1000 in a paint job.nowadays you can have more then that in just the primer coat.

 

I bought a qt of paint, primer, and clear. Then there is the hardener and reducers, a bit of sand paper, 1 roll of 2" tape and some filler came to $350 at NAPA.