I’m not too impressed with the choice of paint colours and interior colours on the current MX5. I did a trawl about and found that Dandycars once bought a new car and painted the car metallic green over the silver and changed the interior to tan.
http://www.dandycars.com/Features/News_Blog/Mk3_Coupe_Automatic_Colour_Change_-_Before_and_After.htm
What quality would you get in doing this and what would be the cost?
Quality and cost go up together for paint.
You can rattle-can a car for 50 quid, or you can spend a few thousand getting a proper job done. Seems an extreme thing to do - it’s just the colour of the coating that stops it rusting, it’s not important. If you don’t love any of the colours settle for one you don’t hate.
Have you checked with your dealer to see if custom paints are available as a cost option? A lot of manufacturers do provide this service, but obviously you’ll have to wait while they build your car.
Hi, I reckon do the exterior is hard to justify as the cost to get a proper job is pretty high. But the interior is easier…
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Totally impractical to do the job properly unless money is no object. A full paint change respray requires the car to be stripped to a bare shell and then rebuilt. An exterior colour change is straightforward but as soon as you lift the bonnet or boot there would be the original colour looking awful and devalue the car. If you really do need to do it perhaps you might consider one of the graphics companies to put a film on the car (the sort of thing that driving schools do to a fleet of cars) and change the colour that way. That I imagine can always be removed.
Here is one I found online http://www.superwraps.com/
Are you coming from the same view as myself… I like ‘green’ cars, and ‘green’ seems to be somehow out of fashion at the moment?
Cheers,
Drew.
Well yes, but I just want a different more interesting colour choice. The above posts shows this is not an option, so I will have to settle for std colours and a totally customised interior. I realise that changing the door cards, seat leather and carpets are easy to tan colour, but how do they change the plastic for the transmission tunnel and lower half of the dashboard like this?
Of course another option would be to see if it is possible to import a Japanese home market model, as I am sure they have a different colour range. They certainly do a nice yellow one. Why we are stuck with the poor selection of drab colours in the UK I cannot understand. For now I will stick with my 1991 Mk 1, maybe one day in the future I will get a Mk3 but it will probably be when the current Japanese models become available as imports like my Mk1.
I asked my (bodyshop owning) friend how much a full re-spray would be on an MX5. He quoted £3000. Having seen a 911 and Porker Cayenne re-sprayed in his shop, it does take alot of work to do properly. My neighbour got the same quote from him to re-do his MGF, but thought the £3k asking price was too much. He got it done by another bodyshop for £1500. However, he now regrets this as it is a poor job and he now reckons he’ll have to get it re-done in the all too near future. You get what you pay for.