I'm looking into adding steel flares as part of my restoration. Besides the price of the flares, does anyone have a ballpark idea of how much it would cost to have them installed? Any recommendations on a competent shop in the Inland Empire area of SoCal?

Get them done right. Get the car to McMark. You will be glad you did.

Figure the cost of the flares plus about $2000+ to install and paint. Heavy emphasis on the plus...

I was thinking 3 plus the flares

Heavy emphasis on the x you mean?

Flares themselves are about 40 hours work.

Not quite sure how to put this but, while I'm certain many of you would like to pay less, I'm nearly positive you wouldn't like the results. Great welders know their worth.

Then there's great painters...

For my build:

Flares $900
Rough Install $600
Finishing the first install with the rest of the body work: $1,500

Now...I got a STEAL. You can find good welders that are out of work for whatever reason. Just check their previous work first.

As others have mentioned, the bodywork associated with the flares is more important than the welding. Not getting the curves right is going to make it look pretty wonky.

...or you can just get the car to McMark and not worry about it.

Of course, the body work is only part of the story. Then you need wider wheels and wider tires and the obligatory 5-lug conversion. Once you have that bigger contact patch you'll need more power, to say nothing of the necessary suspension upgrades.

Does this sound like a slippery slope?

Make sure you know what you want out of the car and have the budget to accomplish before you go down that path.

Getting them installed right will run 2k plus not including paint. This isn't a job you want to learn to weld on. Get it done right or don't do it.

butt welded, ground down and mudded you can expect around 2000.00 - 2500.00 + the flares, If there are no other issues with the car


You want them completely metal finished so NO bondo is used, the bottoms reshaped to fit perfectly etc. Hand the man the flares + 3000.00 and start saving for the next installment

$ 500.00 to $ 1000.00+ per flare. Oh, BTW: even if you have an install that requires filler if shouldn't be much. Just a thin transition.

I get that it will be $2-4K for good metal work, but what about any recommended shops in the SoCal area?

If you decide to go forward with flares, please shoot me a PM. I have a set from a previous group buy that I probably won't be using.

GT conversion @ Themetalsurgeon.com

The above $ were quoted to me 10 years ago...I'm sure it's gone up by now too.

Venice Beach Auto Body AKA Beach boys racing did mine. Great job. They have done tons of them and are very experienced.

See this man.

sean_v8_914

http://www.914world.com/bbs2/index.php?showtopic=111018

+1 for Sean Malloy in So Cal...

In no way do these numbers reflect reality. Not even close. Captain Trips got lucky.

he got very lucky his car was already sandblasted and on a rotisserie in epoxy primer along with being a very straight california body. whoever did the rough install did a very nice job of lining them up add that to the fact that the body work was done out of a garage with next to no overhead and he supplied all of his own materials so you can figure another 500 in his total for filler, paper and primers but yes out of a shop the same job by myself wouldve been about $3500

Dan.

You did good!

thanks bob, working on grey matter was a pleasure although his time crunch was a bit crazy