On Mon, 20 Dec 2004, 223rem wrote:

> My girlfriend's Infinity is damaged (dont ask

How'd it happen?

> in 3 places: dent in driver's door, dent in passenger's door, dent in
> the rear+busted taillight.

H'mm. Sounds like anger might've been involved somehow.

> The dents are not big. She went to a body shop today (recommended by the
> Infinity dealer) and they gave her an estimate of $9,000 and 3 weeks.

This is probably a "We really don't want this job for one reason or
another, so we're going to quote something completely ludicrous, but if
you're damn-fool enough to pay it, we'll do it for you" quote.

Of course, you don't mention some of what we need to know about the car.
Does it have a fancy pearlescent or special metallic paint? If so, and the
dents are serious enough to require repainting, then spot repair won't get
the job done, for it'll never match, and they'll have to repaint entire
areas of the car to get an acceptable finished appearance. That said, I
bought a top-line custom body restoration and color-change paint job in
2002 of a car about the size of the largest Infiniti (car, not SUV).
Included was complete disassembly and stripdown, some dent repair, some
rust repair, some modifications to order, expoxy encapsulation against
rust. The whole thing ran me about $4K and took about four weeks. Do with
that knowledge what you will.

> So my question is how does one go about finding a cheap body shop?

Gee, that's easy. Find your local Earl Scheib or MAACO. The quality of
their work and paint is lousy, but it's cheap.

I imagine you're after something in between "We'll paint any car for
$189.99" and "$9000". If that's the case, it's going to take some shoe
leather (or tire rubber). Start by looking in the yellow pages, then
driving around and getting some estimates. Perhaps one of the relatively
new paintless dent repair places can help. Taillamps can be fearfully
expensive from the dealer; check ebay or www.car-part.com for a less
expensive replacement.