Painter Inquiry

[EZ$]

Bill, I have no idea what, if any, of the items you mention may be in play here. I was a contractor for over forty years, so if he had any of those issues, and had approached it from that standpoint, I may have understood it, but it appeared that he just sat on my car for the first four months before even starting body work. I know this because I requested to get the go-kart back to complete some items before the body went back on, and I could not pick it up until the end of January this year. He keeps telling me it's issues he's having with the body. It's an FIA body from Mr. Bruce. Thing is, he did Bill Dobbins car not too long ago, same Mr. Bruce body, so all the issues he keeps mentioning should be items that he was aware of before starting, and he should have been ready to deal with them. He took about 14 months to do Bill's car, and I'm concerned that I'm headed down the same road.

[mrmustang]

Originally Posted by EZ$

It's an FIA body from Mr. Bruce. Thing is, he did Bill Dobbins car not too long ago, same Mr. Bruce body, so all the issues he keeps mentioning should be items that he was aware of before starting, and he should have been ready to deal with them. He took about 14 months to do Bill's car, and I'm concerned that I'm headed down the same road.

I like Bruce, he builds a nice product, yet he mixes and lays up each product, one body at a time, at times, not always using the exact same mix for each layer of product, couple that with the out gasing and curing of each body that Bruce does being different, and the quality of each body not being the same, and you come up with any one of a thousand different things that can cause the process to go extremely slowly. As with Ken, I would have hated to rush through a job just to make a customer happy, only to have issues down the road and have to redo the body and/or paint for free later on. The 3rd party "unknown" of the body, and the slow curing and out gasing that most likely is still occurring are most certainly to blame for the better part of the delay(s). A FFR body, pretty much a production line piece, is a known entity with it's own known quirks, and I'm certain that is why those get done much faster than the body in which you supplied the paint shop.

As for the your time as a contractor, did you ever have a time where that one single piece was needed to finish a job, but was not available anywhere in the world? If not, then you'll never understand the amount of different base materials that are in just one specific color, and how each base material to the formula gets mixed down to 1/10th of a gram, and anything over or under that formula will affect the final product/color. It really is a specialty business these days, and in California, made worse by the local and state oversight and regulations not found anywhere else in the country. My old state of PA attempted to try the same type of oversight, but got shot down in their senate for being an overreach. Cooler heads prevailed, or I may have gotten out of the business 6 years prior to when I lost my lease right after hurricane Sandy.

Just saying

Bill S