Wow Bob, I sure hate to hear about your cancer. I hope & pray that is behind you for good now!!
I am going to play Devil's Advocate a bit towards a bit of Bob's post just to let everyone think thru this a tad further, and to confirm some of what he has stated.
Notice he said paintwork "exclusive of some bodywork", which generally means this can be expensive too depending on the method chosen to repair the panel. It can be as least time consuming as loading the panel full of filler (Bondo, Rage Extreme, etc.) and sculpting it to be smooth, -no matter the thickness, ....or it can mean using a hammer & dolly to straighten the panel. As stated above, Time = Money.
Paint lines such as Nason or PPG's Omni are indeed great choices for Model-As because of several things. The technology is older and as such, the price is cheaper. Second, the pigments on most of these lines are not as top quality which more closely replicates what original Ford's paint pigments would have looked like. The downside to Omni, Nason, and other similar lines is the quality of the binders and the UV hold-out is not as great as Chroma or Concept, but then again, for most of our cars, they are not exposed to vast amounts of sunlight on a daily basis. As Bob mentioned, some paints are softer and more susceptible to scratching, and this is due to the shell hardness, -or lack thereof. There is a fine balance between having a shell that is too hard vs. one not hard enough. Not hard enough does scuff/scratch easily and is difficult to color-sand and buff. The flip side is too hard of a shell just chips. Then to confuse the issue, there are 'supercharger' hardeners available for painters to use that increase the speed of the drying process that also embrittle the paint. The best process is to use a hotter solvent to allow the paint to flow without falling off in the floor. This takes a much higher skill level and ties up the booth for longer periods. (remember that Time = $$ thingie again!!
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Now my thoughts regarding a Flat Fee vs. Time & Materials goes like this. A warranty is only as good as the paper it is written on, and at our age we really do not have the $$ nor the energy to fight it out to make us whole. Now consider it this way. No one likes being taken advantage of. We live in a society where we expect to be treated fairly, --or else!
So if I am required to give a firm price, as an honest businessman that must pay his bills first and then have enough left over to buy food, I am going to estimate the job as to what I think it will take, then add in a little more to cover what I may have overlooked, and then if I am smart, I will add in yet more $$ to make sure I don't lose money on this job. So the job that I felt could be done for $7k then had another $2k added just to cover the potential unknown and maybe another $3k added because of the guaranteed price. While the customer may accept the job for that price, imagine the feelings when I finished the job and I tell him it actually came in at $7,400.00, --however he still owes me $12k for the job. He is gonna be mad and tell everyone I overcharged him by 60%. Now you & I know the whole story, but imagine the story that will get told about how that customer got scre**d by the painter!
So lets look at it from the reverse side. If the job was bid at $7k, and the shop owner reached the $7k budget mark and there is about one days worth of work left, what do you think is the most likely thing that will happen? The law of averages says the shop owner knows he is losing money and at that point is looking for a way to cut his losses, so details begin to be overlooked that makes the job come out less than optimal. At this point, ...who actually wins?? The customer??
Now lets explore the fairest solution if both sides want to be fair and honest with each other. That is Time & Materials billing. The key component to making this method work is trustworthiness. That first begins with the shop owner trusting his client to have sincere expectations and be willing to pay accordingly at a fair market rate (i.e.: not expecting something for nothing.) The client has to have trust in the shop doing the work that they do have the experience & equipment to do the job to a satisfactory level, and they will be transparent with their documented time. A breach on either side of this trust causes an implosion. So now with the T&M billing, the client knows that if the shop owner is giving an honest accounting of their time & materials at the rate that customer agrees is a value, then both sides come out fairly. In the case of this scenario where the hypothetical job went over budget by 15%, the shop focuses on doing a great job not worrying about constrained budgets, and the customer know they received a value for the $$ they spent. For all we know, the original poster's paint job may have been done with a constrained agreed price where the painter was in over his head due to hidden work that needed to be done.
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