Shop's want to be paid on time so I as a customer don't want to be dragged out until the shop gets around to it!!! If the shop takes on more work than it can handle in a reasonable manner of time, that's not the customers fault. Shop's need to be accountable......... Now I know, I'll take some shit for this, But I only offer it as an example. The shops featured on TV take jobs and give a completion date and in 95% of cases deliver. Yeah, they have a large staff and can turn stuff around in a hurry. As stated above, any pro should be able to determine the scope and depth of the job and offer a reasonable target date based on their own capabilities!!![/quote] X's 2
Shure you base the estamite on other builds, but do you always build the same car. How many times you set a budget at what you want to spend, then the car starts looking good and you start to up the costs with new stuff to go with the new everything else. Comunication is key and drop by alot to see progress.Never pay all up front but expect to pay a deposit. Thing dont happen overnight when fab is involved. Not all new parts just go right on. Paint/body allways takes longer than expected and you should see progress. When it comes to specialty cars everything takes twice as long, being that you cant replace and paint match if you mess up being in a hurry. These kinda of cars arent your run to the dealer to replace if broken deal. You need to have reality on time and money or find another hobby like fishing.
If the shop finds a major fuck up...communicate with the customer, then amend your estimate and completion date. That's part of the business. Shop's that don't offer reasonable estimates and target completion dates lack credibility. Additionally, shops that do and communicate with the customer about problems don't have problems like the one laid out in this thread!!! Can someone tell me what X's 2 means!!!!?????
DUH.....shit, ya never know....sometimes with this internet thing the most obvious isn't always the answer!!! Thanks!!!!
i agree with everybody that a year is way to long if your not getting updates on your car the only point i was trying to make is that if the cars at a regular collision shop there only gonna be working on it a coupld of times a month.
As a painter, I can identify with the shop owner a little bit. I have a young celebrity client who does'nt understand why I can't push her to the front of the line, (it's a guitar however, not a rebuild) to meet HER deadline of appearences, new year's eve shows, etc. It's a simple First-In First-out rule. If I broke it for her I'd have to break it for everyone else. I say, warn 'em, complain, send in a "mystery shopper" to make sure they're not on the wii, whatever....then get a lawyer.
It is never unreasonable for a customer to ask for an estimate of time of completion of any job. Any shop owner who believes his customers should just blindly write checks every 2 weeks for work completed without supporting receipts and time sheets should be in some other business. The name of the game is honesty, customer satisfaction, quality work, and work completed for payment received. Sure, there may be delays due to parts availability, labor problems, weather and power problems BUT the shop owner should be the first to call the customer and explain the situation, the first to offer solutions to problems, the first to provide information about parts, costs, etc..
First let me ask a question. When you initally started this project, how many shops did you go to?????????????????????????? Here is a subject that really burns me. I was in business for myself for over 30 years and always, always gave my customers written estimates of both time and cost. Materials change all but if you know what you are doing you can also estimate these. Maybe you have never had a car/engine/transmission rebuilt or totally built by anyone before, and I can live with that. Any shop that will not give you an estimate for labor/time/materials, I would personally RUN NOT WALK away from. As far as having the shop by parts for the build, this should have been discussed before ever sending your truck there. A shop that will not provide invoices with retail costs of items to you with at least a copy of the original invoice with number marked out, again I would personlly RUN NOT WALK away from, but this should have been discussed before hand not after. And the part of them refusing to at least give you retail costs is just BS. Personally if it were me, I'd come with a means of taking your car/parts and bring a checkbook to pay whatever amount is owed and take it out of this shop. I would ask the owner out to lunch, or at least sit down with him either before he starts his business day or after. I'd explain my concerns and tell him you happy with his work (if you really are) then tell him that the build is taking much longer than you thought it would and you are looking for alternatives; Give an estimate of what the time/material/cost is to completion. At least give you sometype of invoice showing retail prices. Go over the build again, take notes, and set some time lines. If he will not comply with any of the above, I would be prepared to take the truck out of his shop. I have seen friends get into this situation all too many times and although I feel sorry for them, I just can't understand why they let themselfs get into this situation. If you are spending good money and putting your trust in a Business Owner then you need to expect professionalism, and I'm sorry, but this is not professionalism. IMHO
I did manage a collision shop for a number of years . We used repair orders to keep track of parts and labor booked on jobs . This shop owner should be doing something like this correct , how does he keep track of his dollars earned and spent .. Does he stick invoices in a manilla folder ?? . He shouldn't show cost but a record should be kept with at least the list price he is charging for part . Labor profits same thing even if he pays his help cash books have to be kept. All in all he should be able to say ok i have this much in your build at this time no guesses involved. If he cant give a estimated time of completion he is useing it as fill in for slow times . This type of work can take years to get done read it many times on forums.
It doesn't sound like an unreasonable amount of time on this truck for the amount of work that has been done. If they stepped it up and your monthly invoices are doubled or tripled, does that still fit your monthly budget for the build? I guess it depends on what was explained or agreed to when the build started. Juggling multiple jobs is the bane of small shops, I know it is in mine. Here's the problem. With old cars parts can be hard to come by and take time to get. Additionally outside vendors - sandblasters, powdercoaters, chromers etc. can take longer than expected. When any of these parts or labor delays happen, the project sits. The shop still needs to work so they have multiple jobs going and that definitely causes scheduling problems. Just something for you guys to realize. It can be a nightmare for the shop owner. I have had customers that say "I need/want this car done in X amount of months". If that was faster than normal for the build, I would explain to them that it would require that theirs would be the only car that we would concentrate on and that means that they are going to pay for 40 hour weeks per employee assigned to their car, even if there were holdups beyond our control. My employee's have a reasonable expectation to make a living and if a customer demands a schedule that excludes the employee from having other work available during that build they should expect to still be paid. If there is other work that can fill in, fine we don't bill the first customer, but if we couldn't schedule other jobs due to the demands of the first customer, then he needs to pick up the slack. I would NEVER give a copy of my invoices to my customers. That would be like going into the Chevy dealer and asking for a copy of the invoice where the part came from that repaired your car. Ain't gonna happen. The shop should be providing you invoices from them with the parts that are used on your car and you should be able to see those parts. The shop is responsible for the warranty on those parts and your invoice from them is all you need, or should expect. I'm not defending or condemning this shop. I just wanted to point out some of the things that people don't think or know about. i do think they should be able to give you a best guess on both the time and money that will be required to finish this truck for you, especially this far into it where they can now see what's required to finish it. Maybe they are in over their head or just don't manage well. Hard to say without being involved. I would try and work it out with them if you are happy with the work so far, otherwise, it probably is time to move on. As for the comment about the TV show cars - that's funny. I know a few of the shops and people that have been involved in those TV builds and I'll relay just one story. On a particular TV build that "took 10 days" according to the show and the famous star, I asked the shop owner how many of those 10 days he had the car - "3 weeks" was the answer! A year later it was at his shop to finish the stuff that the "Build Team" never did or did wrong. ONE YEAR LATER! And this was not an isolated instance I can assure you
If it was my project, I would get together with the shop manager and express my expectations and the apparent misintreptation of them. I would apologize that I misunderstood the original agreement, (apparently you don't have it in writing), (I would apologize, even if tongue in cheek, because there might have well been a misunderstanding). I would propose to close out the current work order, pay up to date. If they balked, I would show up with a trailer and a quartet of heavy lifters, prepared to have my attorney receive an emergency phone call from me. After paying up and receiving my property, I would move the entire project out and sleep on the decision whether to continue with this contractor or find a new one. If they are a good company they will understand. If my sudden micromanagement of my project is a thorn in their side, tough.
Time spent on my project is time spent on my project.....40 hours this week or 40 hours over a month..it's all the same cost to me!!!! The retail cost of parts is easily obtained from the internet. I don't care about your profit margin, But i do want to know that the exact part I specified is on my car. A photocopy of the invoice is a resonable expectation. The inability of a shop owner to determine the amount/number of work/jobs that it can handle and keep all of their customers happy is no ones fault but their own!!! Problems with suppliers are an explainable delay!!! Forget the tv shows.....be accountable...set a target date and stick to it (given communication and explainable delays). Also shop owners should also hold their suppliers to this same standard!!!!!
if this isn't a case of not paying you bills (which it sounds like its not) Or a case of changing your build plan 10 times over the year (which it doesn't seem) I'd part ways with this particular builder. The demands you've made don't seem too unreasonable. And if he can't find a satisfactory answer to your questions, you should find someone who can.
It's actually a very simple pair of questions totally unrelated to your truck. Do you trust the current builder? It seems his work is sufficient quality and priced fairly. This is mainly a timeline issue. Do you think you can find another builder in your area that you trust just as much? Step back, cool off, and take a thousand foot overview of your situation by answering those questions. Now, if you decide it stays, you've got to learn how to motivate em without making it feel like you're motivating them. Business owners do not own businesses because they like bosses, so don't boss em around. Start eating lunch at the shop and kick around ideas. Need something out of a catalog? Daydream in the catalog at their shop. Like it or not, with this builder the only estimates you're going to get are tiny little ones. So start looking at the truck as a series of small tasks and focus on that. Ask if they can send your seats out for upholstery this week. Ask if they can commit to having body mounts welded in 7 days. Be friendly but always be there asking. At some point they'll either catch creative fire or get tired of you. Either way, progress will increase. good luck PS- a custom car is not an appliance and big parts invoices should follow it for life. You need to express that you understand there's markup, they need to supply you with invoices, and you need to be very silent about markup afterward. good luck
Showing the customer a new engine, transmission and shiney new parts should be adequate without showing invoice from vendors. What you might consider a reasonable mark-up may be your customer thinking you are gouging them. For motor, trans, big ticket items, the OP should have been approving an approximate cost anyway. Showing packing slips is one thing, invoices is another. No customer ever gets to see my invoices either at my shop or in the business I run on a daily basis. I know how much I pay for an item and I price it accordingly. The shop the OP is dealing with probably gave him a cost for the motor, trans, big ticket materials costs. Agreed. As the OP stated, the shop has 10 other projects in house. This would seem to be an expectations issue, not a shop scheduling issue. I agree it should have been agreed to up front, but since it wasn't contracted on the frontside, forcing the issue now isn't the answer. Based on what the shop provided, I'd say that it has been accountable. The OP knows exactly where the project stands. The fact that he's dissatisfied with a one year time frame for a full rebuild, including drivetrain shows expectation problems. Again, you use unquantifiable terms "reasonable target date" for a quantifiable, contractual statement. What is reasonable to the shop may not be reasonable to the customer. A full rebuild of an old truck probably can't be predicted within six months. This is due mainly to sourcing of parts issues. I would expect that restoring/building a 32 Ford could be predicted to within a week by a shop because most of the parts are repopped. However, I dare you to try and predict the rebuild of my 55 Pontiac wagon where repops are nearly non-existent except where they cross the chevy wagon. Also, if the shop gives the OP a "reasonable target date" now, you can be sure that the OP will be at the shop that date to pick up the finished vehicle and we're right back where we are now if it's not finished...a pissed off customer because the builder can't give him a fixed price at a fixed date on the rebuild of a 50 year old car.
He's gotten updates. He provided detailed information in this thread about his invoicing and what's been completed. It's not like the shop is doing nothing, his car is almost complete.
To answer the original question...................it depends on what you agreed to when you started. I am retired and having been a very successful business person selling products to major corporations all over the world and some of these products costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, I can't understand why a small business owner can't give a writen estimate of time and costs to do a project. Sure there are little things that come into play, but the business owner is only in business because of his customers!!!! If you have a satisfied customer he becomes a FREE SALESMAN for you. So what differentiates a good shop from a poor one, CUSTOMER SERVICE AND QUALITY. I think hotroddon has some good points and that juggling multiple jobs does take a lot of thought and effort..................but this is not the concern of the customer! If you take a car into a shop for a build you should expect to get a written estimate of cost and time! As for outside vendors, this needs to factored into the build time by the shop owner...... if the owner knows XYZ powdercoater usually takes 2/3 weeks............maybe he needs to factor 4 weeks to be safe, and if it makes it in 2 weeks...................he is that much ahead. For customers that demand a time line then they need to pay for it............I totally agree with hotroddon. As for the invoices/costs, if a shop won't give me a copy/or sometype of invoice for parts that are purchased (at a retail cost level) then I'd tell them to go fly their kyte somewhere else...............because they wouldn't be getting my business. One way to take care of this is to order your own parts and have them delivered to the shop doing the work (that is assuming the shop has given you a time line for the parts to arrive). I would much rather buy a Crate Motor and have all the warranty paperwork myself............do you think a shop that buys a Crate Motor from Chevy is going to warranty that motor......NO! As far as the amount of time they have had the truck, unless this truck is used as a "Fill In" most of the time, I think 6 months sounds more like it. Actually how many hours have you been billed for? Here are a couple of short stories, for your reading enjoyment. I have seen a couple of friends fall into this trap, and although I thought they were business oriented people.............when it came to their cars.....................they were not. When I started looking for someone to do the body work on my A Coupe I made and interesting discovery. I first took it to a body guy here in NorCal that does fill-in work for a Big Name Hot Rod Shop. Now this guy does nice work and when I went to his shop he had one hot rod and a Bronco. I asked him to come to my house and give me an estimate of cost to fill the top, fix the chop, put in some patch panels, and install the new wood kit. He went away and later that week he called me, or his partner called me. He said it would take 500 hours and their shop rate was $60/hr. He was willing to fax me a written estimate but that he felt 500 hours was a NTE (not to exceed) amount. So............500 hours times $60/hr..............is $30,000.00. When I told him he was out of his mind, he reminded me of the quality of his work and some show wining cars were done by him. I said thanks but no thanks. I then went to a local guy (rod builder) and saw his shop, he a 68 Camaro on the frame jig (this was my neighbors car but I didn't know my neighbor then), a 50 Caddy, a couple of old VW buses, and an almost finished early Ford. Again, I asked him to come and look at the car and he and his partner did. He gave me an estimate of 250 hours @ $65/hr....$16,250. I said I thought 250 hours was a little much. I called a friend in Oregon that had a very successful Mustang Restoration Shop and been in business for some 25+ years (he had actualy seen the car while down here) and he told me it would be somewhere around $10/15k to do the body work and paint it. He told me it would probably be in his shop for 3/4 months because of his other SCHEDULED WORK, and may even be a little longer. One other point before finish. My neighbor (the one that had his car in the second shop I got the quote for $16,250).......................he pulled his car out of the shop after giving the guy some $30k over the course of 12 months. My neighbor never received a quote, never recieved parts prices, got an invoice every 3/4 weeks with nothing but total dollar amount and basically got screwed. He took legal action and the shop is no longer in business, although he did get almost enough back from the shop to cover his legal fees. So, what I am saying is that if you don't nail down how much you want to spend and how long you expect the build to take during you first/second discussion with the shop, then shame on you. And only going to one shop and not getting more than one estimate is like only going to one doctor that has told you that you've got cancer and have two weeks to live......................... This is my opinion, but unless we stand up and fight for better business practices from these shops people are going to continue to get hosed!
Maybe it's been noted in an previous reply, but I would have asked these question before leaving the truck with them. A simple: About how long will it take? and About how much will it cost? If the answers were: "I don't know" and "I don't know" I'd have been moving on. Plus, if I had the money for someone to do a full frame off, I'd have also sat down and done a full write up and cost estimations for each, I know that doesn't help you now, but might help you with the next place you take it to.
this whole thing sounds like the blind leading the blind to me. if you took an entire vehicle in for a Hot Rod build..and didnt ask the right questions, and didnt have a plan set out, and the owner of the shop didnt sit down with you to see where you wanted to go with this..than you are Both Fucked! so dont blame it entirely on the shop....I think you have alot of responsibilitys in this mis-communication and circus of blunders. And If the shop owner didnt sit down with you and answer your questions and or if you didnt ask any at the begining..than no one and no reply on this thread is going to help this situation.Because it is all "after the fact"(too late to change it).take your learing experiance and either move on to another shop and do it right this time..or wait this guy out and try to work with him for a solution
Exactly right, but even when things are worked on, there is usually years of neglect, and substandard repairs underneath multiple layers of old paint, it takes longer. Even when we punch the timeclock on a job, most customers want to bitch about costs of repairs. Think about it, if we tie up three guys for one week, and bill out for labor and materials, we barely break even on the job. The scope of everything becomes magnified even further when you have to build parts from scratch. People seem to get caught up in the idea that these cars are a "hobby", and while that may be true for the owner, a shop has to make a profit. Most shops are turning down the restoration or custom customers, because they almost always lose money on those types of jobs. As far as waiting forever on an engine, I suspect that someone used a local shop hoping to save some coin, and perhaps the engine in question is something out of the ordinary. It is my experience that you can have it fast, or have it cheap, but cheap almost always takes longer...
It is simple, Some folks will deal straight up.... Some folks will screw you a little if they can.... Some folks will screw you a LOT if they can.... and some folks will steal every thing from you that they can possibly get away with, and then say it was YOUR fault that you got screwed.... These rules apply to companies and consumers alike... There are some shops that will work on your car while making little or no money... (these shops go broke..) There will be some shops that need to be able to bill customers, but they don't really like to work... Some people like being a hard ass just because they can.... these folks wont tell you shit.... And some customers are such a pain in the ass that shops woe the day they ever took their car into the shop.. so they don't tell the owner shit because he hates the owner.. As far as the forum thing goes, there is no way that we can know just exactly where we are unless both sides are represented.... hmmm. maybe the best idea would be to invite the shop owner onto the forum..... That would help to sort things out... Rest assured,,,, no matter what car you start with, or what shop does the build, when having a build of the magnitude done, the build will cost more than the car will ever be worth and by a whole lot...
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