Looking for a good painter near Seattle for my '75 914. Stock color, no real damage aside from some slight surface rust, door dings, needing the tweaked hood replaced, and some other minor items taken care of. Daily driver, so the job needs to be finished fairly quickly.

It is going to depend what your goal is and what your budget is.

A repaint from MAACO (or someone similar) can probably be done fairly quickly, will cost only a couple thousand, but it is very possible you will not be happy with the quality of the job. I wouldn't be. In fact I'd rather have original paint with some surface rust and dings than a MAACO repaint.

A "good" job from a body shop that would include fixing the dents and dings but not painting the trunk interiors, jambs, etc., and in the same color as current, would probably be about $6-8k and would be filler work for them...2-6 months.

A "great" paint job from a body shop that does restoration work and would include a complete repaint is about $20k where I live. It would take up to a year.

Thanks

You could try having it wrapped.

Correct me if im wrong but when you
Do a expensive paint job
Dont you have to almost dissemble the car and paint every thing
Then put everything back together ?

20k and a year time seem like a restoration? ,

On cars these old when you get into spending 10-15k on a paint job there is generally a decent amount of rust repair involved. That's where (I believe) the other 5k comes into play.

There's a lot you can do to reduce the cost of a repaint,strip the car as much as possible,bag and tag all parts and take plenty of pics.
You could get the dents removed by a local panel guy,sand the car down yourself and apply a build up coat and flat block that off then then apply a suitable basecoat for topcoat,so much info on here and the net,you can save huge $$$$ doing this,good luck.

Plasti Dip. You could do it yourself. Wait until the summer, obviously. As long as you apply enough paint evenly, it will peel right off. There are also shops that will Plasti Dip under $1K.

this is what I did. Turned out OK.

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For daily driver use I'd be careful about spending too much on paint - personally my goal would be preserve the car and have it be presentable.

Anything beyond that is likely going to have you wince every time it gets dirty, wet, scratched etc (which as a daily driver it will).

For my driver I did use a Maaco body shop (the third one). They are not all the same. The difference between them is staggering. Price and quality as well as work ethics.

I paid them $1,900 to change the color of the car. It would have been $1,450 to keep it white. Car needed some bodywork and stripping of cracked paint, as well as filling in holes from antenna, previous spoiler and side mirrors.
On top of that I paid another $2,000 on new rubber and seals, windshield, valance, airdam, floormats etc.

Follow this link to see how I did it (Maaco painting action is about halveway the video).
https://youtu.be/3ByJvvXwkdk

Final result is good (but no concours winner).

My 914 was painted In Kirkland WA at Eurotech Bodywerks. The guy who had the car at the time had it done there prior to the guy I bought it from. This Paint job was 23 years ago and the same Eurotech owner is still in business, I spoke with him about a year ago. The paint on my car is great, but it was done at the time with Imron. You may want to at least check them out, I believe they used to specialize in Porsche. Best of luck!


Eurotech Bodywerkes
13209 NE 126th Pl # A140
(425) 823-4282

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