My sister, living in the Washington D.C. area, owns the vehicle. Like many Ford Tauruses, it has badly peeling paint. Who does a decent repaint job for a reasonable price?
Cars Direct.comhad an article on low cost car painting. They spotlighted Macco and Earl Scheib, but had some other tips in the article as well.
FWiW, I’ve always used Maaco for my car repairs (accidents) and painting and been totally satisfied. Earl Scheib is still in business? Didn’t know that.
Bob
ditch the taurus, buy 2 fuzzy bunnies, mate them to make enough money to buy the 2013 taurus sho…just a suggestion
Earl Scheib as a corporation has been gone for a few years, but the individual franchises were able to keep and adapt the name.
The cheaper paint shops are definitely a YMMV option. Most of those shops have one or more guys who can put on a coat of paint as smooth as liquid mercury, but they often fall short in prep, so you’ll see things like overspray on the tires, rough edges where someone did a 3/4-assed job of putting masking tape over the logos and trim, etc.
Anecdotally, the best results from the “We’ll paint any car, any color for just…” places are when the car owner does most of the prep before taking the car to the paint shop - eg: removing trim, antennas, and even doing their own filling and sanding of small dents.
How long does she plan to keep the car? After all, it is an eight year old Taurus.
Wow. How is it possible that a 2006 model year car already needs a paint job? Are the Ford factory paint jobs really that bad? One of my cars is a 2007 MY, and the paint still looks as good as new. A few years ago I sold a car that was over ten years old, and it too had nearly pristine paint (sure, some rock chips and the like, but certainly no sign of systemic problems, peeling, etc.).
I have pretty high end cars, so I go to high end shops when I need body work. So maybe I’m just out of touch. But my intuition would be that a cheap shop is a good way to get another paint job that needs to be re-done in a few years. Of course, if you’re not going to keep the car much longer anyway, maybe it doesn’t matter…
I got a Maaco paint job on my 6 year old old pickup after a wreck, and it made it about another 4-5 years before it had significantly dulled and was starting to abrade away on the upper surfaces of the car.
Granted, this pickup spent 24/7 out in the weather, but it ended up being roughly $100 per year that the paint job looked halfway decent, which seems not to have been much of a bargain.
I’ll admit it looked terrific for the first 2.5 years though.
::Snicker:: That’s just a baby! I own 4 vehicles, each driven daily by me, my wife and 2 of the kids. The newest of the lot is a 2003 Ford Focus. One of the others is a 2000 Taurus. My personal driver is a 1996 Mazda Mellinia. Lowest mileage is about 125,000, highest is over 180,000. Properly maintained, todays’ vehicles can last a loooong time. Beats the heck out of a car payment (or 4 :eek:) in my book!
Car only has 65k on it. She drives very little. She’ll keep it for another 5-10 years.
Her previous TAUrus had the same problem, so maybe a Taurus/specific color paint problem.
Thanks so far for all the input.
Edited to add—I had Mercury Grand Marquis that had paint problems. I’d see the same model year/color in a parking lot, and it had the same paint problem I had. Blame Ford.
I’ve never had a car that NEW (or maybe it just seems that way). I got a Maaco paint job once. I was very happy with it, but I walked in to order the $199 special and ended up paying closer to $800.
A cheaper alternative is to plasti-dip the car. It results in a different sort of look (matte finish), but it’s removable.