sahtt

Looks like he spent thousands of hours just polishing various parts of the car that are rarely if ever seen. It's supposed to be art not a car you drive around.

Y2KS2K34

correct me if im wrong but i am fairly sure that i saw that car on the show "Rides" it was competing for the Riddler award with is hot rod of the year and was built by some one fairly well known

TheDonEffect

Hot rods, especially one of that caliber, does cost that much to build. Good body work is not cheap, most people think a paint job should cost <2000 bucks, an OEM paint job book time for most small to midsize cars is about 3000-4000, a show quality paint job? Or a show quality, long term paint job? Yes there is a difference.
Then you factor in you can't find body parts easily for these cars, and there's alot of repair time that goes into these cars. It isn't like putting an integra back together where you could find aftermarket oem style and quality replacement fenders for under 100 bucks, try having to sand blast each panel down, patch and weld each rust spot, then block it so it;s perfectly flat, etc etc. Alot of finesse work.
There is a reason why hotrodders look at tuners and laugh at them like noobs, you wanna talk to guys who know how to build cars, talk to these guys. Anyone can go online and read DYIs and order parts.
That all said, no I don't think it's worth it although I do believe that it probably took all that to get it going. Keep in mind the average frame off restoration with quality replacement parts, reworked suspenson, etc, typically runs 40-60K with a decent complete vehicle to begin with, this vehicle was completely reengineered, it isn't like doing a 2jz swap in an s2 and throwing on a tein suspension.

JonBoy

Just the paint job on a project like that is a minimum of $25K and typically much more. Perfection is required for every part of the car. Nothing can be wrong on it for the level of competition it will see. Overkill? Sure, to me. However, the prestige that comes with winning a major builder's competition is well worth the price to some people. These cars take years to build.

Penforhire

That's right about paint. I recall the build on my buddy's hotrodded '69 Camaro. He got close to $10K in the paint and he could have kept going higher. And I thought his body looked straight right after beadblast! Aside from 100% prep, the cost was the number of rounds of block-sand-primer-straighten. You have to chose how much waviness or ripples are acceptible because the cost just gets nuts.

His advice to me was classic because it was so true. Draw up a budget for your project as accurately as you can, paying attention to all the upgrades, known issues, and special parts. Now double that budget, no reason, just double it. Now you're close to what you're really going to spend! Funny but true.

I'd say a fair price is more like 40-50% of whatever it cost to build.