First bill from bodyshop......im scared

Hi there, my car has finally gone into a local bodyshop for some repair and a respray.  Initailly the bodyshop owner came to view the car and had a look around it and we spoke about what needed to be done.  In the past the car has been restored which included an acid dip.  Unfortunatley this has led to rust coming back through in areas as it wasn't reprotected or pacified propely.  The sunroof is the biggest problem area as the aperture has deformed due to rust forming around the seam.  This will involve the removal of the sunroof tray, a repair piece being welded into the roof and then the sunroof tray being replaced.  A tricky job even for a good bodyshop I would imagine. The engine bay will also need blasting and painting with a few repairs required to rusty areas along with a few small repairs to the sills and floor.  Nothing major though and he said my budget of around £5000 was achievable.  Ive fitted a set of BBS rs 15" wheels and the first job was to modify all four wheel arches to accomadate the wheels properly and allow the suspension to work properly without any contact with the arches.  This I thought would be a reasonably straight forward job for a competent panel beater.  I was hoping that they would pull and roll the arches and that would be enough.  Instead they have been extended and the lip or return section has just been cut away.  Repairs were also made to the inner arches.  He emailed me to say all four arches were complete and then sent me the job sheet.
  For collecting the car, removing the front wings, modifying front and rear arches to house the larger wheels and repair the rear inner arches the bill came to £1750 which included VAT.  Now I was a little shocked when I read this and double checked that there wasn't any other work they had done which I had missed.  But alas nothing else was done for this cost.
  Originally the arches weren't part of the initial quote as we didn't think they would need to be modifyied, so this cost is on top of the original £5000.  On the job sheet he has 41 hours to complete the arch work.  This seems a little excessive for a bodyshop who this kind of work must be bread and butter. Im now concerned that the final bill is going to well over the £5000 that was discussed and im wondering whether to go ahead with any more repairs.  Ive told him that before he continues I need a good estimate of what the remaining work is going to cost as it looks like its going to be well over my budget.
  Id be interested to know what people think of this, whether im overreacting and maybe suggestions of places that can perform top class work for more reasonable prices.  Thanks.

No bodyshop can look at a 30 year old car and give an exact cost unless it was already in bare metal with all the bad bits exposed.

No decent panel beater is going to work for peanuts either. its a highly skilled job and is noisy, smelly, dusty and hot.

£400 for each arch is probably about right if you consider the body shop's overheads, materials used and having to invent the shape and not just replace.

In a nut shell restoring and modifying classic cars is not cheap if you want it right.

Yomp is correct.

The main thing you can keep doing is to stay in communication with the body shop bud.

It is a bit like a renovation on a house, if you have a budget, certain things get left sometimes or get done cheaper to stay in that budget.
If you don't have a budget, you can have it the way you like it, but believe me it will cost you!! 

My brother did all the welding to his mk1 escort and quite a lot of prep work, the castrol paint work after leaving the body shop came to just under £7000!!! Even that wasn't perfect.

Keep in touch with them so you can work your finances out a bit better in case they carry on, they will do what you ask, but they must be made aware all the time of your budget.

Hope this helps 😊

Thanks for the feedback.  I totally agree that this kind of work is highly skilled and given that his work is supposedly second to none i was expecting it to be on the high side.
  I also agree that £400 for repairing and modifying a rear wheel arch is fair although i did expect the second rear arch to be cheaper once the patterns were made and he had got his head into repairing the first which was the worst of the two.    The front arches would require much less work being only single skinned and needing no repairs, only extending slightly which is why im still a little shocked at the price.
  Im waiting for him to get back to me regarding the roof skin repairs.  I know its not possible to give an exact estimate on the overall cost of repairing an unknown quantity but id imagine a skilled and experienced panel beater would be able to hazard a worst case scenario estimate surely.
  On the plus side he has said i can can come along and do what i can to save on labour charges.

I understand what you mean about the arches regards once one is done the others should take less.
Not seeing the finished article its difficult to comment further but all that is being saved is some of the thinking time.
You mentioned in the first post about pulling the arches and rolling up the edge.
Pulling on an arch will just distort it and put a crease in it. Metal doesn't just stretch.
A good panel beater won't want to rely on lots of filler to sort out issues. Filler certainly is a quick fix but deep filler is bad. It cracks and sinks and looks terrible after a while.
If he's willing to let you come and work on the car yourself then the guy sounds genuine. It would be a good exercise for you to do because you'll see just how much time passes verses work achieved.

one question? why are you making arches to accomodate RS's, theyre 3 piece wheels, you can make them whatever size you like?

Looks like your not eating for the next month lol.

Didn't you get a price for the arch work before they started or did you just trust them not to rip you off?

That is very unprofessional of them not to inform you of the cost for welding four bits of metal onto your arches have you looked at the work yet?

Looks like they charge around 40 quid ph if so the rest of the job should come on budget to prep and spray car. Just have a chat with them about your budget  and tell them you were shocked by the first bill and you only have a budget of  5k and hope you can come close to this.

Sounds like you have big plans for the car and sure it will be a show stopper when finished. Let us know how you get on

If you have any problems I have someone in calverton notts mk1 escort specialist and we know how pickey ford men can be with there concourse cars lol

He said that he was going to send me pictures of the work whilst I was away which I haven't received yet.  Hes very open about his work and im welcome along to the bodyshop to do jobs on the car myself, the last time I was there the young lad that works for him was working on the car so I could watch him work if I wanted.  
  Ive built the wheels how I wanted them, maybe I could have found different baskets to reduce the offset etc but I quite like the idea of subtly modified arches.  If I had known what it was going to cost id have looked at doing things differently.
  Still waiting to hear back from him about the cost of the remaining repairs.

reading this I am so glad my best mate has a body shop as my both my arches need replacing …….good job it is going to be as my mate says ……….A LOVE JOB  

I had my arches extended by a place in Notts called Kimberley Coachworks at a cost of £700. The metalwork they did was really good !! Just a shame about the paint work they did  

Hi mate do you have any pictures of the work they did?  
  

Have a look on page 11 of my build thread mate and you'll get the idea of my extensions.

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http://vwgolfmk1.org.uk/forum/index.php?page=topicview&id=projects%2Fyour-mk1-golfs_2%2F82-cabriolet-s3-tfsi

i just think £1750 in archwork when you can build RS to suit it is really quite bizzare myself  

genuinely struggling to see why if im honest.

All mods are down to taste and most of them have been done before. There's very little that's new.
However, subtle mods that don't smack you in the face can be the ones that take the most amount of time but often make the car stand out from the rest.

As they say, "The Devil's in the detail!"


 

Am I being a bit thick here but don't 15" bbs wheels fit anyway without any mods needed….??  

I've got porsche 4 pots up front and and had to use 20mm spacers so they fit in my rm's. The fronts are 7j and rears 7.5j. If your running standard callipers and not a massive width , you'll get them under with camber & stretch. Something I didn't want to do as I'll be running nearly 300bhp and didn't want to take any risks. 

Standard BBS wheels may well fit but ive built mine with 2.5" rims at the rear because thats how i like them and i wanted scope to increase the size of the dish as i also have a set of 3" rims again because thats what i like.  I could have thrown a standard set on and lowered the car and probably still suffered from the wheels catching the arches after lowering the car with some spirited driving.
  Brad if you know how to build a set of RS wheels with 3" rims that need no arch modifications for the wheel not only to fit but to actually work properly through the full range of suspension travel then thats great i actually like the wider stance that has been created but was just shocked at the price.

no need to get ratty at just me, i asked a question and gave an opinion.

narrowing your track would be considerably cheaper than all arches widened, i personally dont like wider arches unless theyre berg style. just another of my opinions again…

  Not getting ratty mate, ive started a thread about the cost of the repairs and modifications i want doing not to be told that im going down a bizarre route with it, regardless of what you do or dont like that wasnt the reason why i started the thread.