Quote Originally Posted by EliteCustoms
Is that $15,000 just for the paint (that includes materials and painting labor)?

There's a lot of work (and money) when you start involving stripping the car and working it from front to back to get it to the painting stage. Honestly $15,000 seems very very good for a show winning job if its being stripped down to the bare metal. Price depends on the shape of the car and how far you want to go with it.
How do you strip to bare metal ? 3 ways I can think off

acid dip
soda blast
walnut shell blast
3M stripping wheel

Okay that's 4 ways there are probably other ways as well, but I use the 3M stripping wheel, it is resonably fast and the cheapest since I use my time. The one I would not use is the acid dipping stripping, because it gets into the sealer and sealed edges of the body making it a herd job digging out the remaining sealer and then resealing. Then some people say that the acid in the dip eats the carbon out of the steel and hardens the steel so that it cracks through car use over time.

Talking of cracks, you do a real killer paint job, you have a nice torquey engine in it, that bigger motor tweaks the panels, so that they all go out of alignment anyway or worse cracks the paint after some good full throttle blasts. This is especially true with your older cars that all bolt together, eg guards, doors, body panels, body to chassis,know what I am saying ?