Originally Posted by importguy1208

What people don't seem to be understanding is that we did not extend his credit line in terms of what we had into the car cash wise by very much.

On a basic paint job color change there is around $1000 in materials for the type of paint I use and the method I like to prep a car. This car has more money in paint because of the engine bay and interior panels that were smoothed and painted so I would say probably more like this:

$1600 in paint materials, then we have $700 in NEW Toyota seals, $700 in aftermarket gauges for the car, $800 in carbon fiber and fiberglass supplies, $50 in clamps, $20 in gaskets. We have lots of other little odds and ends we had to buy during the job but I'm not going to nit-pick those on here.

His ebay wastegate was missing the sleeve that seals it so we used a Tial I had at the shop, no initial cost out of my pocket since I already had it and was planning on selling it. Then we found a hole in his intercooler so we used one from a MK3 Supra Project that Branden was building for himself, again we already had. But between those two items we had $300 on the bill.

What it boils down to is that we spent a lot of time working on his car which is where most of the bill comes from, LABOR, not that we had $16K out of pocket.

Although it did keep us from working on other cars consistently, I did several overall paint jobs that were color changes, did some other small paint work jobs, built two engines, did three engine swaps, a tranny job, and two head gasket jobs.

The problem is that all the profit from those jobs went into keeping Joe's car going so that I could get that big pay-off from all the labor. Now I feel like I did all those jobs for free in addition to Joe's car.

EDIT: Joe's Mom's car