Well boys, i think I'm getting screwed. My cobra is officially complete, but the final bill is way over what I thought it would be. Granted, it looks nice, but holy toledo!
Before starting they told me verbally and via email probably $6-$8K, worst case $11K. After getting it primed they finally gave me another estimate of 189 hours ($50/hr), + paint and supplies, totalling around $13K. When completed it moved to 234 hours, and $3150 for paint and supplies. (Blue with White stripes).
Final Price... $14,850.00
The job looks good to me, but I'm not an expert, or even a novice for that matter.
As I'm on the road working a lot, I also asked this shop to do the final assembly as well. Estimated 60 hours, final was 205 hours with $1600 in parts. Parts were fine, and no big deal, and I had to ship anoth $1500 of parts to them. But the Labor went from 60 - $3000 all the way to 205 - $10250.00.
I asked for an updated price consistantly, and never received one. I kept getting told it would take a while to put it together. When I finally got it, there are math errors throughout the hand written pages, and then a final sheet that just kind of slaps some numbers together, and then adds on a bunch of hours.
So the estimate in just hours went from 249 to 439. I thought they were giving themselves plenty of room with the 249. What is your opinion? What can, and/or should I do at this point? Granted I can probably cough up the money, but I'm looking for opinions. I have not responded to the final price yet, so I have not asked them to explain yet. Just preparing first.
Also it took them 12 months to finish, the orginal estimate was for 2 months. Also I went with this shop because of one persons reputation, but most times I stopped by there was some young apprentice/laborer guy working on it.
-jbr