How much to paint my car
 

I'm new to this so I don't know if this threads in the right place but I have a 2004 yellow rx8 and I want it red, so where should I go for a quality paint job and how much would it be? Also I want it Velocity red so is there a paint code or something for that?

The price will vary by shop but for a good paint job your looking at atleast $2k.

I had my old eclipse painted and i paid 3gs for car show quality paint job. Its not cheap

Call a body shop. Then call another one.

You'll regret any paint job for less than $3000

I paid about the same to paint my old eclipse as well.

Figure on 10 - 18 hours of labor at $90 - $150 and hour (depending on the shop's reputation and the current condition of your vehicle's surface and bodywork) and $500 - $900 in materials, depending on the color (Velocity Red base coat is $120 a quart compared to $60 a quart for Brilliant Black - clear is another $60 a quart and primer/sealer is about $40 a quart).
Any repairs that have to be made to the surface are extra. The labor is just prep.

^is BB the cheapest paint??

if so...looks like ima be a brilliant black come next year :D:

^.....................what they all said................and the Velocity Red paint code is 27A.

I'd love VR instead of silver....


But that has to wait until the LS1 is installed and dependable.


budgets SUCK!

Yeah, but only the base.
Clear coat costs the same for every paint job, so you are only saving about $300 - $500 out of a $3500 job at best.

If you are going for a color change, realize that there is a LOT of extra labor prepping and spraying all the "hidden" spots like the engine bay and door jambs.

at LEAST.

realistically i'd say $5k.

i went to the body shop i always go to (been there.. oh.. 12 times?, lol) for an estimate on my beater. a 1986 bmw 325i. they said about 7-8 grand. hahaha.

Had my whole car painted (including jams) very recently. It is interesting to note that the whole car with custom paint was only double what it would have cost to paint the hood (and blend) with VR. The labor was similar and VR is expensive. I hesitate to quote what I paid, but my experience was in line with most of the numbers above.

I will mention that in 1988 or so I got my Datsun B210 painted bumper-to-bumper with a nice yellow for $100 and was pretty happy with it.

^ In 1996 it cost me $800 for a quality full boday spray job on my Eclipse. Today you're looking at $3-5k.

1988 $100
1996 $800
2010 $3,000

That's inflation for ya!

depends on the body shop i guess... but i would think most, if not all body shops, charge paint materials per hour.
It might vary depending on where you live, but figure anywhere from $25 - $35 per HOUR of paint.

Figure labor @ $35-$45 an hour and about 40-50 hours and you do the math. and this is just purely paint and paint materials. Any thing that needs to be removed... belt strips, headlamps, tail lamps, doors, etc etc will be extra.

I say $3000 on an immaculate car with little or no body work involved. If you want the work done "by the book", there's a LOT of R&I to do... so it really depends on how much of a quality job you want.

why not yellow ? @@
it limited color, only the first year of the production has the yellow color, FTW

...and then it depends even further what color you want painted. For example, I had a 1993 Cavalier Z24 I painted myself (it's what I do for a living) and I was looking at different blues. The color I went with was GM "Deep Atlantic Blue" and it costed $230 a gallon. There was another VW color very close to that color that was $980 a gallon. When it comes down to paint prices it just depends on what tints are in the color. Reds seem to cost more than any other color. Most colors today have pearls in them instead of metallics which makes it a little more price wise. That VW color I was talking about had a color changing pigment in it and that's why it was so ungodly much.

If you are looking to change the color completely and want to do it right, you need to consider the engine compartment too. It would look a little off having a blue car with a yellow firewall, for example. This is very labor intensive considering you might as well pull everything out of the engine compartment so you dont have to worry about overspray getting on anything in there and it will cut down on materials such as masking tape and paper.

Huge job, sell it and buy a VR.

^ yeah, i'd just do the same

hmm...
So what if you were just going back to factory color, with maybe a little more mica in the paint?
Assuming that you'd do all the sanding and prepping yourself.

Even if you pay 5 grand for a paint job, it isn't going to be as nice as factory...honestly, I'd just sell your car and look for a VR one for whatever you get for yours plus 5 grand.

I went to shop close to my place and wanted to paint the car a midnight blue like the Shinkansen color the guy gave me between 3-4 thousand plus carbonfiber wraping the interior and mazdaspeed wing

+1, and whether it is flakes, metallics, pearl, etc. Dont pick a normal RX8 VR color code. If I was you and was wasting good money (which you should) I would get a custom RED. You pay BIG so might as well get BIG in return. If anything, Black Cherry SHinka would be the only stock color I'd pick.

Well, that is definitely NOT true.
A good aftermarket paint-job is WAY better than OEM in every way except chip-resistance.
OE paint is thin, uneven in density and full of orange peel.

^+1 x 10000000000000!!!, After visiting Axial Flow w/ Izzy for a "possible" 09+ Short Shifter :suspect:....(pics coming).... Axial Flow and I agreed that the paint is really thin and MAZDA wasted no money in painting the car. Taking apart the shifter panel, we cleary seen that MAZDA couldnt afford a bit more paint. :sad: