HRMINI

It's been a long time since I worked alongside body shops.  Are there any on the southside that any of you would recommend from personal experience?  Thanks! :D

Jeff

You are not allowed to ask for recommendations for a body shop without telling what happened to your MINI.  :P

Maaco - Hampton -757-723-0765

Owner Dale Blankenship  future Mini owner, has done work on obehave and F15 cars. Terry was real pleased and from the pictures of Ben's car http://www.hrmini.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?t=1207  it looks real good :P

I don't even have my MCS yet! :D  My MCS is laser blue with a white roof. I want to get the roof painted sparkling silver with laser blue racing stripes down the center of the roof, sunroof and all and sparkling silver Viper stripes on the laser blue on the bonnet and boot.  I remembered after starting this thread that an old friend of mine owns Custom Body Shop in Virginia Beach so I called him and told him what I wanted and he said around $500. *shrug*  Seems a fair price to me.

I saw the pictures in that thread and it looks like he did a great job. I'll give him a shout when I get my MCS around the middle of April.


Does anyone know what brand of paint BMW uses to paint Minis?

The MINI factory paint is a water-based, extremely-low VOC mixture designed to be applied with factory equipment and then oven-baked.  I don't know if independent shops can get it, or even if they'd want to use it if they could.

Any of the major auto paint manufacturers (PPG, Sherwin-Williams, DuPont, etcetera) will be able to provide paint that matches the factory paint perfectly.

I'd suggest just having whatever shop you select use the paint they normally use for matching factory paint - they're probably going to do the best job when using products/processes that they're most familiar with.

Good point about the known processes. :)  I suppose any other brand of paint would stick well to water based paint, right?  I know with house paint you *should* paint over latex with latex, oil with oil etc...

Well, I don't think the factory topcoat (clearcoat) is water-based, and to do what you're planning, the shop would just need to scuff up the factory clearcoat to make a good foundation for the new paint.  I'm pretty sure that's what they did when painting Ben's roof black - scuffed up the factory paint and shot the new black basecoat followed with a polyurethane clear.

Any good shop like the ones you're considering aren't going to be caught by surprise with any of the factory finishes, so I wouldn't worry too much.

That is going to be gorgeous!

Thanks! I sure hope that it's going to look good!  I've never been one to follow a trend or set one.  I just know what I like. :D

Correct, a lot of OEM paints are water based. While aftermarket technology is still evolving (CA is leading the way) it's still a ways away. I'd figure using a standard base coat-clear coat system. We would use DuPonts Chroma-base system. We've been very happy with it and have had very good results. Doing the roof and some stripes isn't a big deal. In fact doing F15eWeapons roof was very straight forward. On the stripes, I'd suggest vinyl however, that way you may be able to change them later if they get old. But we can paint them easy enough of wanted.