PAINT and BODY....SHOW QUALITY (SOCAL)

[StaticX27]

Originally Posted by illxs14

m1 autobody.

Personally I had my FD painted by M1 autobody. I wasn't terribly happy with their paint job quality. Overall it was decent, I would give it about a 90%, but I had alot of complaints about their quality of work. First, the paint on the hood warped pretty quickly to the point that you could see a rainbow pattern on it. Secondly, I had specifically asked for them to make sure they cleared the door jam vin tag, since they tape over it to paint. I just wanted it to be smooth when I got it back. They didn't do that at all. The FD mirrors were two pieces, one for the housing, then a trim on the outside of the mirror. One side, they painted it and it came out looking like one piece, yet the other side they had painted it and it came out as two pieces with pieces of paint joining the two. There were a couple places that had dripped that they didn't take care of.

I mean overall the car came out looking pretty decent. Also the paint came out looking a little hazy, and I consider show quality paint something you could shave in if you look at your reflection in it. Thirdly, and this is the big one, I checked up multiple times on the car and every time they were like "omg it's gonna look nice!" Then when I picked up the car, they said "Oh man, there's enough body damage on here you probably don't want to keep this." It left a sour taste in my mouth as I would have preferred they told me so they could repair the body damage, or two they could have stopped the work and I could have sold the car and paid them for work completed plus a little extra for saving me the headache. It was more of an annoyance over anything, and I kinda felt like my money had been taken. Granted, I was being extremely critical over the work that was done, and for $3k I should be a little critical, but honestly the work that M1 did I could have gotten done at other shops for 2/3's the price. Not to mention the fact that it took them 3 weeks longer than they originally quoted me.

That being said, I've seen cars come out of M1 that look absolutely beautiful, but those are their own show cars, which naturally they're going to take the extra time on, as those are the cars that represent them. However, that's not their normal level of work. I look at a body shop's average customer's quality of work and I base their quality on that over their cream of the crop work, since more often than not, they're not going to do that cherry job for your average customer.

Also, when they were installing my side skirts, they cracked the fiberglass and couldn't rivet it to the door towards the top. They basically used alot of double stick tape on the inside to make it work, but it didn't look entirely right because of it. You can kind of see a gap on the rear of the side skirt where it joins up to the rear quarter panel, when that gap shouldn't have been there. They didn't offer any way of taking care of it, just basically put a bandaid over their mistake. That also left a bad taste in my mouth.

Here are some pictures of my old FD. You can kind of see the job, but I didn't really close up on the unhappy parts. Unfortunately I don't have it anymore, so I can't really show you my gripes:

[SUPERSTAR]

Originally Posted by StaticX27

Personally I had my FD painted by M1 autobody. I wasn't terribly happy with their paint job quality. Overall it was decent, I would give it about a 90%, but I had alot of complaints about their quality of work. First, the paint on the hood warped pretty quickly to the point that you could see a rainbow pattern on it. Secondly, I had specifically asked for them to make sure they cleared the door jam vin tag, since they tape over it to paint. I just wanted it to be smooth when I got it back. They didn't do that at all. The FD mirrors were two pieces, one for the housing, then a trim on the outside of the mirror. One side, they painted it and it came out looking like one piece, yet the other side they had painted it and it came out as two pieces with pieces of paint joining the two. There were a couple places that had dripped that they didn't take care of.

I mean overall the car came out looking pretty decent. Also the paint came out looking a little hazy, and I consider show quality paint something you could shave in if you look at your reflection in it. Thirdly, and this is the big one, I checked up multiple times on the car and every time they were like "omg it's gonna look nice!" Then when I picked up the car, they said "Oh man, there's enough body damage on here you probably don't want to keep this." It left a sour taste in my mouth as I would have preferred they told me so they could repair the body damage, or two they could have stopped the work and I could have sold the car and paid them for work completed plus a little extra for saving me the headache. It was more of an annoyance over anything, and I kinda felt like my money had been taken. Granted, I was being extremely critical over the work that was done, and for $3k I should be a little critical, but honestly the work that M1 did I could have gotten done at other shops for 2/3's the price. Not to mention the fact that it took them 3 weeks longer than they originally quoted me.

That being said, I've seen cars come out of M1 that look absolutely beautiful, but those are their own show cars, which naturally they're going to take the extra time on, as those are the cars that represent them. However, that's not their normal level of work. I look at a body shop's average customer's quality of work and I base their quality on that over their cream of the crop work, since more often than not, they're not going to do that cherry job for your average customer.

Also, when they were installing my side skirts, they cracked the fiberglass and couldn't rivet it to the door towards the top. They basically used alot of double stick tape on the inside to make it work, but it didn't look entirely right because of it. You can kind of see a gap on the rear of the side skirt where it joins up to the rear quarter panel, when that gap shouldn't have been there. They didn't offer any way of taking care of it, just basically put a bandaid over their mistake. That also left a bad taste in my mouth.

Here are some pictures of my old FD. You can kind of see the job, but I didn't really close up on the unhappy parts. Unfortunately I don't have it anymore, so I can't really show you my gripes:

Third person with same feelings, Thanks for the warning.