The Stovebolt Site Forums The Shop Area Paint and Body Shop Bodyman, where art thou

Almost hijacked another post so thought I should come here and vent. Do you know a good, reasonable Bodyman that is willing to bump out old fenders? If you do you are among the few lucky Bolters. Around here body shops are paid BIG dollars for ordering parts and doing quick insurance jobs. I have no problem with these guys making a living but then the talented ones don't want to do daily driver metal bumping because they can make BIG bucks in the same amount of time doing cut and paste on new cars. Where are we going here? The average Bolter can't pay some guy to $70 an hr shop time to rework a fender when he can now buy a reproduction, which leads us to the point that we loose our few remaining GOOD Bodymen. Another Lost Art???

Food for thought...
Buddy

Its all about money bro. However, maybe its not all lost. We do have a number of paintless body repair guys around here that push out dents, but its in the thin new modern iron, nothing like what you have in your 50s trucks.

not sure what to say but it is the same here, I have a good buddy bodyman all his life, he won't touch anything except an ins job. easier to screw a huge ins co than a person you got to look at. brian

I've put about 10 hours of dolly and hammering, heat and welding on my 46 hood to get it back in shape and it's slowly coming around, the body shops in town wouldn't even look at it as all they do is replace body parts, plus you can't get that gage of sheet metal anymore, with a lot of patience it's starting to look good. Somewhere on this site I heard you can use the metal from an old oil drum to weld in small panels as it's close to the same gage.Bob T

I think that's where we, the lovers of old iron, are supposed to pick up the slack. I'm not good, but I get by and I'm getting better with every project.