I've been following this thread with interest and a little amazement. Most people are clearly clueless as to what it really costs to do a quality repaint. Our shop paints about 4-5 bikes in the average week, including new Davidsons, repainted Davidsons, and vintage restorations. Let me tell you what it costs. For starters, I employ a painter who earns about $15 an hour. He has painted Porsches and VWs and does about the best work I have seen. He preps the frames till they are perfectly smooth and has a knack for mixing paint so it never chips, peels, orange peels, flakes or fisheyes. It is perfectly smooth when he is done. I feel he is a bargain. The simplest paint job, including stripping, bead blasting, epoxy primer, color coats and clear, with no body work, takes him about 6 hours. There is $90 right there. Now add the cost of materials. Just the pigment these days costs about $50 a pint. Since everyone wants their own color, we rarely paint the same color twice. Add the reducer, hardener, and possibly other additives, and clear coat, and you have at least $100 in paint costs. Add sandpaper, sand for the sandblaster, paint stripper, masking tape, gun cleaner, gloves, masks, and all the other paraphernalia it takes to do a good job, keep the painter alive, and meet the legal requirements for painting, and you get a pretty large number. Now add the rest of the overhead items like lights, heat, rent, insurance, etc, and pretty soon you have a paint job that costs several hundred dollars. Now if we were trying to do the cheapest fastest paint jobs imaginable we could shave a little off this, but we do the best job we can on every frame we paint, and it often adds up to a lot more time than this. For instance if you have a frame that is rusty and requires a lot of body work, it can easily take another 5 to 10 hours of the painter's time, plus more materials like bondo, primer, sand paper, decals, etc. then you start to add up to a very costly paint job where we might make a couple hundred dollars. Our paint jobs run from $350 to about $700 unless there is chrome too which we job out. We do it because we are passionate about bikes. We aren't laughing all the way to the bank. Ask anyone who has had us paint a frame if they feel like they got their money's worth. Every one will say yes. If anyone has any questions about this I will be glad to answer them. Anyone who does the quality of work that we do understands what it takes.
Yes it can be cheaper to get a bike painted in the UK. What does that have to do with the price of rice in China? I have 60 or so bikes from the 20s through the present, many of which were painted in the UK. Some are very nice and some are quite regrettable. I bought one frame recently with original paint but not needing repaint, for $165. I bought another fully restored by Argos (quite nice) for under $400. I am sure that paint job cost more than what I paid for the frame. The UK is a different world and you can't compare to the US. Send your frame there and pay $125 in shipping each way and see how it works out.
Bob Freeman Elliott Bay Bicycles 2116 Western Ave Seattle, WA 98121 206-441-8144 Home of Davidson Handbuilt Bicycles
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