My POSITIVE experience with Bob Norwood

I believe I've read all of the threads on Norwood portraying him as some crook/bad guy and instead of adding to one of those threads I think it's best to start my own. I can obviously only speak about my experience, I have no knowledge of exactly what happened in the other cases.

I've only known Bob for about two months. I of course knew who he was and have read all of the magazine articles about him from back in the day. I'm a recent transplant to the Dallas area and when a GTO project fell in my lap I knew just who to call. I was surprised to find out that he was not only still doing his thing, but he had two 288 GTO projects at his shop. We talked on the phone about my project (I had not yet bought it) for about 30 minutes....I did not receive a bill for that phone call ;-) He suggested that I come by his shop that weekend and have a look at what he was doing. He also wanted to see pictures of my potential project. I was so far impressed with his willingness to help me out even though I was not yet a paying customer. He was very generous with his time and I could tell he still loves building these things. As has been mentioned before, he's not afraid to talk s**t about other shop's work and I'm pretty sure every other word out of his mouth is a curse word. If you're sensitive to that than you have been warned. I find it refreshing and hilarious. I have a good time whenever I'm hanging out with Bob.

So on to my project. It's a 77 GTB that had a short GTO body glued on about 7 years ago. When I picked it up about 2 months ago it was a bare chassis/body on casters and random parts in plastic tubs. Bob and I agreed that the best way to do proceed was to convert it into a proper GTO rebody with correct body panels, that are bolted on just like the real deal, as well as a correct removable rear subframe that would extend the wheelbase 4". He quoted $2500 to stretch the frame and then we would go from there. I dropped the project off with him on April 16th.

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That first day the car was unloaded and mounted on a frame table. Norwood and his team don't waste any time. They were cutting the old panels off right away. That is one thing that stands out with Bob and his crew. They do not **** around. These guys get **** done. I have built many cars, mostly Porsche's. And have worked with a lot of different shops over the years. No shop has ever come close to the work ethic of Bob and his crew, so refreshing to deal with guys that do their job and do it well...this is not very common in my experience unfortunately. These pics are from the next day:
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So here's how Norwood's billing works. His guys all keep track of their time. Every time they work on a particular job they write down a quick description and how many hours it took them. They each get paid differently and Bob will bill you accordingly. Bob and his top fabricator get paid the most, he charges $85 an hour (super reasonable!) Next he has a guy at $50 an hour and another at $25. As you can imagine, the billing can get very complicated...but I'll take that over paying a flat $85 an hour across the board. At the end of the week all the paperwork is turned in to Bob and he has his accountant generate an invoice for the week. So that first week I got a bill for $9k. Now that's way more than we had agreed to but we also started doing a lot more than what we originally planned on. Stuff like unloading the car, cutting the roof off, mounting new body panels was all billed at an hourly rate. It took four guys just to get that thing out of the truck and up on the frame jig. His guys don't work for free so I understand that I'm going to be billed for anything that wasn't part of the frame stretch. I'll admit that I was surprised by the total but when looking over the bill there was nothing in there that hadn't been done and nothing that wouldn't. Need to be done eventually. At this point I asked for a rough idea on what it was going to take to make it a roller. At that point I would take it home until I was ready to move forward with the next phase. Bob really couldn't quote an exact price but he tried to ballpark it. It ended up being much more...sound familiar?

 

This whole time Bob assured me that we would work something out once we get this thing on the ground and we are at a stopping point. But in the meantime his guys kept adding their time, and work kept progressing at a rapid pace. So fast forward 5 weeks later and tons of issues that were out of Bobs control, we now have a roller and a huge bill. We took a few hours to go over the bill and he held up his end of the bargain. Bob isn't out to rob anybody, but he also doesn't want to loose money. We agreed to a very reasonable amount that we are both happy with. My car will be going back to him once the rear panels are back from the fiberglass shop. Just remember, there are two sides to every story. In my experience, Bob is a stand up guy and stands behind what he says. These things are never going to go smoothly. Anyways, just wanted to put this out there in case someone is worried about working with him or buying a car from him etc. Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

Billing on these jobs is tricky. I'll try to explain.

The quote to stretch the frame was $2500, which Bob stuck to even though he went over time wise. So if I just wanted the frame stretched I could have left it at that and we would be done. But since my car already had some fab work done by the PO (shock towers and custom control arms) we figured, lets set the body on there and see where we're at. That's when the time started adding up. We had to change basically everything that was done by the PO plus remove the roof, line up all the new panels etc. I wasn't prepared for that bill, and Bob couldn't really tell me exactly where we would be when the dust settled. He did get ahead of me a little, things like setting the steering rack up correctly, rebuilding the hubs etc. But our end goal was to make the car a roller, and make it look as close to a factory built GTO as possible. When we finally went over the hours, we were both surprised at the amount...but you've got to start somewhere so we went through it together and got it down to a reasonable amount. Bob never lied to me, he never said it would be easy, and he stuck to his word. He also let me take the car home before paying him the total balance. He understands that the bill was more than I signed up for and I understand that I'm way further along on the project than I would have ever imagined possible in such a short time frame.

 

There are very few shops that could build these cars as accurately as Norwood. And even fewer that would even want to tackle such a project. I'm thankful that Bob is still building these cars and willing to do it at what I think is a reasonable price these days....who charges $85 and hour anymore? And although he has been doing this since the GTO was introduced in the mid eighties, he freely admits that he learns something new about these cars on every build. For instance, my car has real GTO hubs and wheels. He's never built one with authentic wheels etc. because they are so expensive and rare, he has always made his own hubs and used wheels that are close but don't have the same offset. That made all of his suspension jigs useless for my car...more time and trial and error. But look at the work that he and his guys turned out. That rear subframe is almost identical to a real GTO, including the way the flanges were constructed. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

Let me start by saying I'm not trying to start an argument here. Your responses are well thought out.

And I do agree that billing for conversations and ordering parts is BS. I also had those charges on my bill multiple times. I believe it's just a way for Bob to keep track of time. I really didn't care so much about each little line item. I knew we would figure it out in the end and that's exactly what we did. Similar to your situation above, Bob ate the overages that were not approved by me.

 

Restoring a 328, and building a GTO almost from scratch are not the same thing and cannot be compared.

 

Jesus dude...who pissed in your Cheerios? Just a 308? Haha...have a nice day and watch that blood pressure. Actually I think Cheerios help with that...not sure about the piss though.