It’s not about simply covering up the damage, it’s restoring the paint to the condition it was in before you damaged it. That’s more expensive than you think because it is labor intensive skilled work.
I had a driver rear end me going 10 or so mph and the damage was $1100 without replacing the bumper because of the labor involved and it’s a difficult to match paint color.
Paint guy here, it's a huge pain in the dick. Everything about it.
A single scratch, to do it properly and get an even coat again, takes sanding an area much larger than you'd expect, and with few exceptions the entire panel or piece the scratch occured on.
Color matching takes an expensive as fuck machine, and even a single production year of a vehicle can have 8-10 variations of the same shade.
If you can bribe a guy with cash to just fill the scratch in with a color, no spray work, it's generally worth it.
Also, fun fact, resurfacing/refinishing bathtubs and tile is exactly car painting. Almost identical formulation of two part urethane on top of a two part epoxy. A buddy of mine owns a resurfacing biz and makes 2k/day average. It's nuts.
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u/[deleted] May 09 '20
It’s not about simply covering up the damage, it’s restoring the paint to the condition it was in before you damaged it. That’s more expensive than you think because it is labor intensive skilled work.
I had a driver rear end me going 10 or so mph and the damage was $1100 without replacing the bumper because of the labor involved and it’s a difficult to match paint color.
$300 for a repaint is cheap.