[e015475]

'Touch' labor is expensive. $50 TO $75 per hour is pretty common here for a shop with overheads. Even more for shops doing insurance work. A good painter in a production shop can pull down $100k but you can hire paint work from Craigslist for $20 an hour. You get what you pay for.

$10k incuded a custom firewall and some fairly significant modifications to the inner fenders to gain header clearance. But it doesn't include the 100 or so hours I've spent doing gruntwork like brackets, jambs and block sanding. Im not terribly efficient at it so it is probably a wash.

I've painted several cars myself from bare metal and kept track of my hours and they've taken a couple hundred hours to produce a good quality paint job. Granted I am not as efficient as someone who does it for a living but thats the ballpark. I had about $1000 in material and another $500 to rent a booth and painter in a production shop to spray it.

Any hobbiest can paint thir own truck - It doesnt take a great deal of skill, you just have to have the time, be meticulous and not take any shortcuts.

Wish I liked 'patina' paint jobs a little more. It would have been a lot cheaper.