It took me all year of saving and buying the parts, and finally its showtime. Im driving the car down to New Orleans tommorrow morning to a real good body shop.

Nothing to out of this world on the Chariot. I went with the Stillen Front Lip, Sarona Side Skirts, and Sarona Rear. I really pushed trying to squeeze in a carbon fiber hood and it looks like im not going to be able to swing it. But I hope to add it next month.

Im having the antenna shaved, dents and dings patched up and the car is going to be painted the same artic pearl white color. The guys that are doing said they mold the kit to the car, so that sounds good to me.

For lack of anything else to do, and as a joke of sorts. This will be sometype of diary while the car it out of my possesion. I expect them to have the car for a week and a half to two weeks.

My first thoughts about the whole ordeal is a bit of excitement mixed with paranoia. You have to wonder if places switch out parts, or take joy rides in your car ? But when its all over the max will look real smooth with everything fixed up nice !

Question: Do some of you other guys have any stories about the wait, and what all you did while waiting for your ride ? Also , what tips and pointers do you have to pass on to me once i have the car back ?

- ceasar

 

Which body shop is it?

 

I have been waiting and continue to wait, on other parts and projects, but I am couting down the days....Soon I hope...


JP

 

siht...I'm waiting for the day to get mine in the shop or my dads yard to do the small work on the body before painting

SpeedCrazie:

Did you do all that body work yourself? from the pics?

 

My suggestions:

1. Do not mold the kit on, no matter how much a body shop pushes this idea to be "cool" it is really not a cool thing to do. It just saves them a lot of time and work getting your bumper to fit.

2. 1-2 weeks for full paint/body kit and some touch up work is almost unrealistic for any body shop unless they are solely working on your car. Expect delays and expect excuses, it almost never fails.

3. Do not paint your car with any extra pearl/metallic without making sure that it gets documented or else your paint will never match again. Make sure they are painting the parts off the car so that you don't get overspray everywhere.

4. And as a general rule, just stay on top of them and make sure you are getting exactly what you want. You are paying for a service, not paying for something to mess up your car.

 

just so you know.. our car color cost more to paint that the other maxima color's

 

Since you're getting a CF hood are they still gonna paint your stock hood? If it saves you some money tell them not to paint it...

 

He already said he won't be getting the hood.

 

To add to that, our paint is a 3 step process. The toyota camry has similar colors to the max but are all 1 stage. Do not get the shaft on that, as I did.

 

i agree with bigsadler about getting kit molded to car. Not sure what kit you are getting but if its an add on like stillen, what happens if your molded and u crack the lip or sides? or a piece falls off cause u hit something? instead of getting new one and replacing u may have to go to shop to get old piece surgically removed or something....

 

I agree with these guys leave Kit molding to the Honda people..Have you ever seen how stupid a car looks when the kit is molded on and cracked when they hit something or the wind pulls it off?

 

jason beat me to it. do everything he said and you will be happy

 

Really, cause his post says he's getting one next month. Anything else???

 

Thanks for the advice, this is my first project and dont know much about it .

note taken on the stock hood !

About the expensive artic pearl white. Should i take a cadillac white or another type ? or another color ? like ange/redlinemax blue ? something that would look good with a cf hood ?

 

How much are you paying for the paint job? If you are not having them paint everything, I would keep it basically the same color. By everything, I mean door jambs, under the hood, etc.

 

I'd stay white unless you want to jam the car out....and paint the engine bay. Molding....like others say dont do it! If you have the whole car resprayed make sure they don't get it on your moldings, lights, muffler, radiator....anything you dont want painted. I see it all the time, and it kills me.

BTW they should spend more time, way more time prepping the car than painting it. The prep work is the most important part. IMO a 2 week paint job with molded body work will look bad. This stuff takes time, and good things happen to those who wait.

 

Ya if you really want to do it right, research a little bit more.

 

hahahha this *********in *** ***** is back and at it again. welcome back to tha org u h0e a$$. i like that sig

 

the cadillac white is hot! i saw a max two weeks ago somewhere online and it looked so good. i can't find it anymore though

 

The sig wasn't my work. All I wrote is I'm back and the rest came out of nowhere.

CEASAR dude, are they just respraying or stripping the old paint off and starting over? If just resparay then just change to a less expensive white. Also you could change the color to one that looks good with white. I have a black car and if I wanted it red they could leave the door jambs, engine bay, and all that black and do just the outside red. It would look kool since the black interior would match that. I don't know what would match white...

 

whats up with the 98 AE headlights?

hehe

the cefiro's kind of went in tonite and i have another "problem" with the bracket on the s/c

 

Ah Jason, you and your Toyota green fender. I still remember all that time we spent looking at your car in different lights and you kept getting madder and madder the more you looked at it.

He is right though, molding is the cheap and easy way out for a body shop. I remember when I got my Sarona kit, my friend at the shop spent 3 days modifying the POS to fit. I remember his exact words, "if I can't get this f@cking thing on by tomorrow, I'm just going to mold it." Hell, I could mold a bumper to a car, just panel epoxy, fiberglass, and bondo. A lot faster and easier than cutting/grinding/refiberglassing a bumper to make it fit right.

And 1-2 weeks is not going to happen. Here's a rule of thumb, whatever the body shop tells you, just multiply by 3. ie, my girlfriend's car was supposed to take a month, it took almost 3. My friend's car was supposed to take 6 weeks, it took over 4 months. Granted, those jobs involved a lot of custom work, but bodyshops have weird schedules and they can't estimate a time frame to save their life unless you're the insurance company. Then they're always right about when the car's going to get done. For a complete repaint, absolutely no way they will do it in under 2 weeks unless they do a really bad job or they have no other customers but you there.

And you may want to paint your car a different shade of white for simplicity and it should be cheaper. But then again, they don't have to get the arctic pearl white perfect since your whole car is being resprayed. As long as it is even throughout, it really doesn't matter. It's not like they're matching a bumper or a fender to the rest of the car.

As for the wait, it sucks. It's a weird feeling to see your car in pieces. I went through it a while back with my car when we painted it blue, and then twice with my girlfriend's car. And next month, I go through it again. It's going to be another 6 week wait or so for all the work I'm getting done. And it's worse when you're basically redoing and changing everything you've already done to the car before.

When you get the car back, don't wax it for a few weeks. The paint has to fully cure or else you can mess it up. And I'd avoid long road trips during this time too. The paint is fragile until it totally cures. And make sure to have some sort of agreement with the shop that they will fix any blemishes or anything else they didn't do right. Look over your car very carefully before you leave, in bright light and tell them about anything that isn't right. A bodyshop can hide a lot of crap work that isn't readily visible at a glance so go over every panel, seam, etc. Bodyshops screw a lot of people unfortunately because body work/paint is very easy to do badly.

 

I love the mismatched paint.. probably one of my most favorite things about my car.

 

it's not mismatched, it's "two-tone"

 

put that " and i still haven't learned my lesson" back on biatch.
cracks me up

 

Day 1 :

Well for starters I live in a very small town and because of this we had to locate a shop out of town that could do the work. As sad as it may seem the places around here could'nt paint a nail with a can of spray paint, right.

Anyways, went out the storage house and put all the parts in the back of our truck. My prized possesions, ha ! Its crazy to think it took the better part of a year to acquire all the parts and then save up for the paint. $2200

Once everything was good to go in the truck, we took off for New Orleans which is about 120 miles south of here.

Arrived at the place. Everyone was real cool and very into the paint and body work thing. Turns out the owner had been doing this for around 18 years now, and they stay very busy doing custom bodies inside and out. The place was packed with body kits, imports, and all kinds of other things.

Its crazy the things you find yourself worrying about until your pull up beside a acura nsx owner who is having his car done up as well. After talking with everyone and looking at the work and the type of cars and awards and so on. Im feeling much better now.

So after explaining what needed to be done we headed out.

This is the crazy part. Not even a mile down the road. I hear a strange knocking noise from the front drivers side of the truck. I pull over and three of the lug nuts are gone, and the other three were minutes from coming off.

Im thinking what tha ? After further inspection 3 of the studs were broken off and or ride home looked bad !

Located the tire tools and tighted all 3 lugs TIGHT ! and drove 55 mile per hour for 120 miles with the occasional pit stop. Im still at a loss on how a tire and lugs could get in such bad shape. It was a close call.

Anyways, day 1 is coming to a close and i dont expect any withdrawl symptoms from being without the max, but getting her back is going to be COOL !

 

what body shop is this?

 

Southern Body Works in Marrero, LA (New Orleans) I guess they call it westbank ?

 

cool lookin forward to seein pics please keep this post updated

 

Yup, same shop where I had my car and kit painted.

 

cumalot, your car is terrific looking by the way ! great job !

 

Thanks. Too bad you don't get a chance to see Wope's car. I saw his car today at school and the paint job looked terrific.

 

what did he have done ? body kit or just paint or what ?

 

here are some pics if anyone wants to see
http://members.***.net/wope/blue.htm

 

Looks good Wope. Why didn't you get them to paint the chrome trim and the chrome handles though?

 

I too would advise against getting the rear bumper molded, or anything for that matter molded. If you were to get hit on the bumper, it would make for difficult replcaement. Also I thought you were selling this car?

 

i thought that the chrome contrasted well with the blue.

 

selling, keeping, selling, trading, selling, keeping...we are nutty around here ! im telling you this old girl (97 max) is a funny car..kinda like herbie the love bug ...she starts acting up when we talk of things like that ..so she is staying .

Dear Diary
I never knew how fast the Maxima heater starts kicking out warm air. Drove this P.O.S. truck to work this morning and no heat no nothing !

 

anything new?

 

nothing going on .. 5 1/2 days and counting. Suppose you cant count sunday (non working day) .. hanging tight !