I need to remove my front fascia to have it painted. How long does it take to remove and reaffix and also what is a fair price to pay for the work?
I need to remove my front fascia to have it painted. How long does it take to remove and reaffix and also what is a fair price to pay for the work?
Location: Northern NJ
Posts: 8,581
My VIN: 10757 1st place Concourse 1998
A lot depends on how many bolts you wind up breaking. Hard to say exactly how long it takes. Also don't know what the labor rate is. Probably a better idea to paint it on the car. It will take a LOT less time to mask it then to R & R it.
David Teitelbaum
I removed mine in probably less than 1 hour to fix the eyebrows, and I had never done it before. I should note, mine was recently refurbed so everything was still pretty new. You may run into rusted fasteners, etc.
As far as painting on/off the car, to do it properly, remove the fascia, be sure to carry the color and clear around the edges that you normally don't see when installed.
Location: Fresno, CA
Posts: 237
My VIN: 10353
I had a local shop repair a few scratches and repaint mine without removing from the car. Just had to ask them since removing would likely snap a lot of rusty bolts. $500
I pulled the front fascia off my car to fix the eyebrows and removal only took a couple of hours. I think I had one stud on the spoiler snap and a few rusty nutserts to deal with but nothing that a dremel and a drill couldn't fix. Fixing and painting other stuff, gluing in eyebrow bars and repairing some wiring took another couple of days.
If you are planning on a full repaint it makes sense to pull it off so it can get full coverage around the edges without tape lines. The headlights also cover a section of the bumper so at the very least you'd want to remove the lights and buckets so you didn't end up with sections not getting fully painted. Plus having the bumper off the car means you don't have to bring the whole car into the shop and worry about overspray or other people driving your car.
I saved a bunch of photos on my old Car Domain site.... The website format is all screwed up and doesn't show the posts correctly anymore but if you go to "all photos" there is some pretty good documentation of the disassembly and reassembly that goes in order.
Having the fascia off the car is also a good opportunity to clean up and paint the headlight brackets, rock screen, repair any wiring issues, clean out mouse crap (or hornets nests in my case), and replace rusty fasteners with stainless steel. I also made some adjustments to the shims and center support bracket to get the fascia aligned much better with the fenders and eliminate/ even out the panel gaps.
http://www.cardomain.com/ride/334145...lorean-dmc-12/
Here are a few pics from that album:
Last edited by Mark D; 05-15-2019 at 10:59 AM.