I haven’t had luck with paint jobs for the 2 times I’ve used them (after accidents). Now, when looking to throw some money at an all-over paint job, I’d really like to make sure I get my money’s worth and get a decent warranty. Given that I’m looking at moving soon, I would like to know of any places that offer nationwide warranties. That way I won’t have to get re-work done by returning to the same place, in case I’m out of state. Any ideas?
The only place I know of that is nationwide is Caliber Collision, but I’m not sure how well spread out they are. Maaco and Earl Scheib I believe are also nationwide but I wouldn’t use them.
Paint and body work is tough. A really good quality paint job costs a lot of money. To do it right (remove moldings, don’t mask around them…etc) there’s a lot of labor and expensive materials involved. It’s reasonable to spend $4000-10,000 for a full exterior respray + jambs from a good shop. For most people this simply doesn’t make financial sense - especially on a car that has a book value of <$3000. There are typically lots of places that will do resprays for $1000-2000 but buyer beware. Sometimes the materials are cheaper, almost always they cut corners with prep work (masking around things, not cleaning up overspray…) and may or may not finish the job with a proper cut and buff. You can get a good (not great) paint job for that price though it’s just hard to know what the result will be without having first hand experience with that shop’s work.
yea caliber is everywhere, and i think they offer lifetime warranty…
Thanks. I’ll see what they say.
I swear I get this crap a lot. Caliber stated they don’t do complete paint jobs. All these shops care about is damn insurance work. What a joke. :argh::gunright::rant:
Doesn’t surprise me at all. From a business standpoint I completely see where they are coming from, we had to do something similar recently at my work - we stopped offering a product that our clients like and need but simply didn’t fit with our business model, we were wasting time on lower dollar stuff when there was plenty of high dollar stuff to do in it’s place.
I wouldn’t hesitate to call around to other locations though, I’ve talked with multiple Caliber Collisions locally to me and found one guy who was willing to work with me. Nice guy and things went pretty well, not perfect but decent enough other than the fairly high price. Luckily I’ve since found a guy that is willing to work with me and the quality seems pretty good so far. They just finished spraying my car and I haven’t yet been over to the shop to check it out. Do you have any car buddies locally you can ask for recommendations? Have you tried calling local Honda dealers to see where they send their cars for paint? Sometimes dealers need to do warranty paint work so they typically should be using a place that does really high quality work. The big problem is that it’s impossible to do a full respray “the right way” with an old Honda like ours which has all of it’s parts discontinued 
Yep. Good luck with your search. I ended up trying to do most of the work myself as most people want huge $$$ or won’t even touch it.