GSRstilez said:
Just absolutely amazing!
Might I ask how much you would charge for a job like that?
First of all, as corny as this may sound, I actually
hate charging anything to polish-out the paint on a car. (I never use the word
detailing to describe polishing paint because to me, detailing is what you do with a
toothbrush after your finished).
Typically, I charge $300.00 to $400.00 per day to work on someone's car. For most cars, I need 2 days.
In the case of the this particular car, I committed to doing it in a single day. That was probably a mistake on my part, but I don't have lots of free time, so I do what I can.
Next for these customers, I will be polishing their 1965 and 1967 Corvettes. For these two cars, I will definitely require 2 days for each car.
The reason I hate to charge money for polishing paint is because it changes the dynamic of the entire process, and in my opinion, it adds a negative dynamic.
To compensate and overcome this dynamic, here's what I do, (this is going to sound strange or corny, you can decide which),
I mentally adopt the car as my own. Then, I treat the car as if it were my own. And... when it comes to my car, I always do everything I can to take the finish to its maximum potential. When I do this, then time is never an issue, and thus neither is the money. Don't get me wrong, I like money and can always use so more, I just don't like feeling like I have to
do something in certain amount of time to make X-amount of $$$.
That takes all the
fun out of the project and for me, that's a big part of polishing the paint on a car... the fun of it.
And that's the strange part, taking a diamond in the rough and polishing it out to a glistening gemstone is a lot of hard work that brings with it a certain amount of risk. You see,
paint is a thin, delicate coating, it is easily dulled and easily scratched. Making a mistake on someone else's toy is an expensive lesson in the
"School of Hard Knocks". Been there, done that... don't want to do it again.
Even though it's a lot of hard work, filled with
danger, (not like in the
James Bond/exciting kind of danger, but in the boring/liability kind of danger), it's also fun and rewarding.
The before and after pictures of this particular project don't show the real story. The car started out looking great, what I did was remove the thousands of isolated scratches out of the finish and then bring the clarity and gloss up to a higher level than it already was. So while up very close there is a dramatic difference, from 10 feet away, it's not to dramatic. It's easy to take an old oxidized Mustang and do a before and after. It's a lot harder to take something that already looks great, and take it to the next level. (It makes you work a lot harder).
Today I'm going to try to set-up a day next week to apply the new NXT Tech Wax to
Sniper
Now this will be fun.
Mike
:bow
