What's the average price to paint a honda shadow one color or two?

What's the average price to paint a honda shadow one color or two?

Asking how much it costs to paint a motorcycle isn't fundamentally different from asking how much it costs to buy a motorcycle--the answer is, how much do you want it to cost?

There are different levels of paint quality, workmanship quality, and detail that can come into play, and there's of course the question of whether you're painting it yourself, taking it to a neighborhood paint shop, or taking it to a high end custom shop.

To put things in perspective, my racing motorcycle is currently three colors and has a single clear coat. I bought the materials from a local Finish Master branch for about $150, used a homemade paint booth, and have a finish that is not detectable from factory by most people. The paint is relatively low cost NASON because it's a race bike--I end up crashing it about once or twice a season--but it's always held up to the elements and most people have commented that it looks very good.

On the other hand, if this were to be a show bike, I could easily buy a higher quality paint, apply several extra coats of it (as well as a few extra coats of clear), and spend a lot of money on custom graphics and the like to get the price up to $1,000 or more in materials. It's all a question of what you want to put into it.

By far though, the single biggest expense in painting any vehicle is the labor involved in prep. Surface prep is the absolute key to a good finish--I'd argue that it's even more important than the quality of the paint, at least from an appearance standpoint. Preparing the surface properly can be the difference between looking like a rattle can job and something that graces a magazine cover, and unfortunately, all that prep takes time. That is to say, it takes billable hours.

From what I've seen from others, it appears that for a given paint job, about a third of the cost is materials, a third of the cost is prep, and a third of the cost is shooting the paint. I may be way off base here--a professional auto painter could chime in--but it appears to be consistent with what I've seen on motorcycle paint jobs around me.

So back to your question---you could spend a hundred dollars and paint it yourself (but spend a whole weekend prepping the bike and practicing your gun technique), or you can have it done by a shop with the same inexpensive paint for perhaps a few hundred more, or you could pay thousands to have something of show quality.

The shadow only uses a fraction of the paint that my bike uses, so my suspicion is that you can get some better quality paint and still come up with about the same cost. Personally, I liked the challenge of trying to do it myself (even though it took a few attempts to get it right). In any event, for the type of bike that it is, it shouldn't be too bad.

Between $500.00 and $3,000.00