Scottwax
07-23-2012, 03:53 PM
A guy called me over the weekend to look at his E46 M3. Apparently, when he was out of town, his brother decided to plastidip the whole car white. The owner of the car has been able to get it off most of the paint, the problem is the areas around the lights (which will have to come out to access all the crap in the seams) and the rubber trim. Some of his trim is in good shape and Optimum Power Clean at 3:1 removes it. But the trim that is weathered and dried out, not so much. Not sure if the best course of action would be to try and clean it or simply cover it up with something that will make it black again. The owner wants to keep costs down so investing a ton of time into cleaning is out if there isn`t a product that will quickly remove it from the weathered trim, so any ideas on what might work (if anything) or a product suggestion to simply cover up the white with something that will permanently blacken it. He told me his budget is $200, said he also wants it detailed. Well for $200, that won`t happen, just looking for a way to remove the plastidip quickly so adding on a basic detail won`t go grotesquely over budget. A detail shop said they could do everything (plastidip removal and a detail) in 3 hours and would charge him $65 an hour ($195) so I guess that is where he is getting the $200 from. I explained to him that odds are the shop will rush through the detail as quickly as possible when they realize removing the plastidip will end up taking longer than they thought and I prefer to be more realistic in what it will probably take to remove everything and then how long a proper basic detail will take.
I`m guessing the owner really doesn`t know what it costs to detail a car because he was stunned when I told him that just the exterior, based on all the buffer and spider swirls he had would realistically be in the $500-750+ range to completely remove. A conservative guess on this car to remove all the plasticdip properly and then do a real inside and out detail would be pushing $750-1000 and I don`t think he is interested in paying even remotely close to that. But if anyone has any ideas who to handle the plastidip on the weathered/dried out trim so maybe I can at least get his car into somewhat acceptable shape and not more than double the $200 he initially talked about, I`m all ears.
I`m guessing the owner really doesn`t know what it costs to detail a car because he was stunned when I told him that just the exterior, based on all the buffer and spider swirls he had would realistically be in the $500-750+ range to completely remove. A conservative guess on this car to remove all the plasticdip properly and then do a real inside and out detail would be pushing $750-1000 and I don`t think he is interested in paying even remotely close to that. But if anyone has any ideas who to handle the plastidip on the weathered/dried out trim so maybe I can at least get his car into somewhat acceptable shape and not more than double the $200 he initially talked about, I`m all ears.