A real week in the garage

Monday: the teardown that talks back

The car came in Saturday, a 1972 pickup the client has owned for thirty years. Monday is teardown of the bed and rear body so you can see what the photos in the listing could not show. Two hours in, the trouble arrives: the rear crossmember hides repair work under a thick skin of filler, and one frame rail has scale you can flake off with a pick.

None of this is a catastrophe. All of it is money, and it was invisible when the estimate was written. This is the normal Monday of a restoration shop, and it is why your estimates carry a contingency and why the teardown phase ends with a revised, signed estimate rather than a shrug.

You photograph everything before your hands touch anything. Before photos, during photos, tagged parts going into labeled bins. The photos are estimate ammunition, client communication, and future marketing in one pass.

Tuesday: parts chasing

The morning goes to the parts spreadsheet. A patch panel is available new from two vendors, one backordered six weeks, one in stock at a price that makes you wince. A trim piece is not reproduced at all, which means eBay Motors saved listings, a swap meet in the spring, and a message to the marque club forum asking who has one on a shelf.

This is half the job and nobody films it. Finding parts for old cars is slow, expensive, and sometimes impossible, and every hour spent hunting is an hour you must account for in your pricing or eat. Parts availability gets its own treatment later in the course, because it decides which cars are worth taking at all.

Wednesday: the machine shop run

The cylinder head rides shotgun to a machine shop forty minutes away, because machine work is subcontracted in this business until volume says otherwise. You drop it off, you learn their current turnaround is three weeks, not ten days, and you adjust the project schedule in the parking lot. Subcontractor timelines are your timelines. Get them in writing before you promise a client a date.

Thursday: the work itself

Metal day. You cut out the cancerous section, fit the patch panel, clamp, check gaps, clamp again, then tack it in. This is the part of the week that feels like the job you signed up for: quiet, exacting work where the welds are visible forever and you are the only judge of whether they are good enough.

The twenty-minute panel takes three hours. That is the actual pace of this work, and every estimator who plans around the twenty-minute version loses money on every job.

Friday: the call you do not want to skip

Friday you call the client about the crossmember. Bad news ages badly in this trade, and the shops that end up in decade-long disputes are the ones that saved surprises for delivery day.

"Two things from teardown. The rust is worse than the listing suggested, but it's repairable, not structural doom. I'm sending photos. The repair adds about fourteen hours plus materials, and the revised estimate is attached. Nothing gets cut until you approve it, and if you want to come look at it in person, Saturday morning works."

Short, specific, photograph-backed, decision-ready. That call is the difference between a client who feels informed and a client who feels ambushed. Friday afternoon you also send the weekly update to your first client with photos, because a client who sees progress weekly does not panic at week nine.

The shape of the week

Notice what the week contained: maybe eighteen hours of billable craft, four hours of parts hunting, two hours of client communication, an hour of schedule and bookkeeping, and a forty-minute drive each way to a machine shop. Roughly a third of a restoration week is not wrench time, and your pricing has to carry that third or the business quietly starves while looking busy.

If that week reads like a good week, you are cut out for this. Next you need the garage and the tools to run it, and the budget is smaller than you think.