Does it bring down the value?
depends. non original colors may have negative result. poor quality jobs will certainly no payback. budget well for the job- prep work, quality materials, and color sanding are costly.
My un-educated opinion is "perhaps." It is always better to have an original paint job than it is to have a fresh repaint, but if the original is getting to look pretty "frayed" then a new factory-correct paint job will not hurt you. This is my experience with many collectible cars. Andrew
A large percentage of 308s have already been repainted. And the vast majority have had some kind of paint work done (rust bubbles, repair stone chips, rust bubbles, dinged panel, rust bubbles). I think a lot of Ferrari owners have repainted cars and don't even know it; if they don't see overspray and tape lines, a lot of them think it's original. If your car has 90+% original paint, have it sympathetically detailed and hold on to the original finish as long as you can. Repainting it won't hurt its value, but an original finish may help its value down the road. You may not enjoy the worry that trying to keep it original brings, though . . .
most 308's have had there paint redone because the factory paint was terrible particularly the early 308's painted with nitro lacquer. the GTSi's are improved with glasurite urethane but they do have the usual rust issues with the doors and wheel arches so many of these have been painted because of that. I really don't think a repaint is going to devalue a car as long as it is done properly. In the end, if you have a 76-79 308 what ever you put on it is going to be 1000 times better than what the factory did. My 78 has a lot of its original paint, though it is starting to check and star...but I will say that the areas that are still factory original, while shiney, were sloppily done.
If the original paint on my gt4 had been in as it came from the factory condition, then it would have been a no brainer to have kept the original paint. But the fact that it was peeling where it was not blistering, and it was chaulking where it was not scratched made taking it to the neighborhood paint shop a no brainer too. At the time, early 80's, it was just a used imported car. The budget paint job was a vast improvement over the factory paint that came along with the rest of the car. The owner of the franchise/shop was named Lucio, and his best paint man was Rocco, there is a chance the repaint was done by someone more Italian than the original painter. You could say that we degraded the car with a cheap paint job, but than if we had not restored the car to that level which our budget had allowed, the car would have been parted out by almost anyone else at the time. So the answer to the question is, it depends.
I'm repainting my '79 308 and have had soda blasting recommended, it's supposed to be gentle on the metal and gets it down to metal faster and "better?"than chemical or sanding. Any opinions? Steve
Three years ago I was having my 1980 400i repaintined..the painter got lazy and recommended powder blasting..powder got into every nook and cranny and into my Entire electrical sysytem,air cleaners ,wipermotor and of course our beloved column switch, relay board and metal relays, suspenion,,and by the way baking powder is Super Corrosive...that why we don't use it for automobile fires..don't do it unless this is a body off job..then fire hose it off..I'm almost back to normal..find a different body shop..you're paying for hand sanding anyway..sorry for the rant..but you will hate life if you do this thing..Jacques.over..
It is fine if you're tearing the car to the frame. If not, I wouldn't do it only because you'll find that stuff everywhere. I found it inside interior gauges on my Triumph. Still finding it from time to time.
One of the negatives of soda blasting (or any blasting to metal) is that you obviously get to the metal surface which is almost always less than perfect, and you will have removed the fillers that were factory placed (308s have a lot) to smooth out the dips and ripples. So, obviously you can redo all of this, but you create a lot of work. I (lightly) mechanically sanded mine down with a DA sander, and then blocked all of it in this stage so that I didn't remove all of the fillers, and you have a pretty nice surface that you can straighten with probably just occasional icers and primer/fillers and thus no heavy fills. It sounds a little weird to block sand in the removal stage, but it makes everything easier (and way more smooth) from that point forward.
Rico has it right, never take a Ferrari to bare metal unless you are chasing corrosion of some sort, 'dem hammer marks are killer!
If you go ahead and repaint, make sure you pull the windshield. If they mask it the paint will peel up.
OK guys. I've tried to stay out of this. I really did. If the car needs paint, paint it. If you paint it, take it to a pro. Have him show you examples of his work. Take a friend for a second opinion. Before you go, go to a Mercedes dealer - find a black car, look at it. Then go to a Chrysler dealer, find a black car, look at it. If you can't tell the difference (and most people can't), then don't pay a lot to paint your car. If you can, then you, my friend, are cursed and you'll need to spend a ton. Once you've found the guy you want to paint your car, don't tell him how to do it. Don't tell him not to take it down to bare metal, don't tell him TO take it down to bare metal. Whomever he is, he will know approximately 1 Million times more about how to make your car look good than you will by reading books. It's nice to be versed in the various techniques so you can understand what they're talking about and so you can understand how much work goes into a good paint job, but that's all you're doing. Most show cars have a skim coat of plastic on them. Plastic is another word for BONDO. No car Chip Foose ever built isn't covered in it. It's what levels out hammer marks, deformations in the metal, etc. Modern Bondo is very good stuff and having it on your car means somebody spent hours and hours blocking the car out to make it flat and smooth and shiny. It is not a problem unless somebody tries to repair crash damage by covering it in Bondo. I'm probably going to paint my 308 soon. When I do, I'll post the whole process. If you want to see the Porsche project you can go to http://hals911project.blogspot.com and check that out. I'm not a pro. My shopmate is. Like you guys, I read a ton about this. I can now tell you after two years of weekends working on five different exotics that I now have a complete understanding of what is it I DON'T know. The best article I saw on it was a few months back in Hot Rod magazine. I forgot the exact name of the article but it was something like "The 143 Step Process to Perfect Paint". That article title says it all. It's an art and the guys that do it are artists. Not technicians. Hal
here's mine. i started with just wanting to do the stone chips...then one thing lead to another...and there you have it http://www.pless.com.au/f355/rebuild/body/