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So Cal PPF installers and customer experiences
- Thread starter GrahamClark_60-68
- Start date
- Thread starter
- #42
On my way out to Elite now, figuring on 30 min with them, then off to PFS, so prob there around 1 or so
12:30-1:00. FYI, a friend of mine that works in auto body repair knows both the owner at Elite and Jason and the team at PFS and he gave them both his highest endorsement. Said they both know what they are doing...I would guess that either shop will do a great job.
PFS is closed from 12:30 to 1:30. I’ll be there at 1:30.
Looks like I’ll be heading there around 3pm-4pm, let me know how it goes for both of you
- Thread starter
- #47
What a coincidence, my ETA is 1:36!
- Thread starter
- #48
Great visits today with both Elite Clear Bra in Huntington Beach and PFS in Santa Ana. Learned a lot, will post a summary tomorrow (see my post in the US delivery thread for some of what I learned) if I get time and also share the info collected in the spreadsheet. Also a great meetup with @T6061 at PFS and his gorgeous Osmium silver Emira. Great talking cars and life and comparing stance with my soon to be garage queen!
I was lucky enough to pick up my emira today and looking to PPF it on Monday. I found a place near Northridge called MAGIC WRAPZ. Yelp review looked great so I called and got quoted for $3800 full PPF with xpel. I don't know if this place is safe to give it a shot since the price is half of what others are quoted for. I haven't done PPF on any of my vehicles and curious what experienced lotus members would recommend. Please let me know what you think.
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That’s an absurd good deal if done right. We would need several pics of close ups around the corners, bumpers and intricate areas
I’d be surprised if paint correction is included in that quote. I wouldn’t put PPF on without doing paint correction first.
My last 2 cars didn’t have any paint correction done before ppf and it looked great. I suppose it all depends on how good or bad the paint looks upon delivery. I’m very interested to hear how magic wrapz turns out as most other places will be double that. Also how much Elite clear and PFS are charging for their work. I haven’t looked this time around but years ago Xpel had a lot more installers in so cal than Stek. I personally will not use Xpel again. Hopefully there are a decent amount of installers familiar with its use as in the end the installer is just as important as the product itself.
- Thread starter
- #53
Ok team So Cal, here's some quick not so quick (now that I've written them all down) takeaways from my visits to Elite and PFS this week, many of which will expose more OCD than I actually though I had. Hopefully some of you can appreciate this:
1. It's definitely worth visiting the shops directly if you can. Only so much can be gleaned by just looking at pricing or talking on the phone. A lot of this for me is coming down to the feel you get about the different shops and their level of expertise.
2. All 3 shops that I know something about now (Elite, PFS, and One-of-One) use the templates which they oversize to fully wrap the edges. All therefore will use the relief cuts, and all agree they are necessary to avoid the film from lifting. Some may approach this slightly differently. For instance Elite told me in some cases they can reduce the size of the relief cuts with no impact on the lifting issue (although I'm not sure or convinced how they could know this until they actually try it).
3. All 3 of these shops seemed to be HIGHLY skilled at what they do. In fact, Elite had high praise for One-of-One and even commented that if they felt the need to "respect" the relief cuts in the template, it was for a very good reason. Additionally when I visited Elite and met with two of their installers, one of them was working on a GT4 wing on a tabletop, and was meticulously butting film edges. It was apparent that anything less than perfection was not going to be acceptable to him. The owner also suggested that on the Emira, they would want to fill the relief cut behind the intake with film as it appears to be in a more visible area. He showed me similar cuts on the front cap of that same Porsche where they chose not to fill due to it being in a less visible location.
4. Elite is a small shop, one room about 4 cars are so being worked on. There were two installers and the owner Craig, who spent a good deal of time with me.
5. Craig mentioned that on the Emira they already did, they deleted the hole in the template for the front badge, laid it over the badge and cut around it very closely, rather than remove the badge. Since they only did front PPF on this car, they didn't touch the side emblems but for full PPF he mentioned that they would do the same For the letters on the back, he said they would remove them, but depending on how that "turned out" I might have to order new letters, which I was not happy to hear. He also told me Lotus hand places the letters so they can be slightly different on different cars, so they photograph before removal and hand replace, without using a template. That answer left me with some discomfort.
6. Elite and PFS are not fans of films with embedded ceramic, even XPEL's version. They feel it's too new and owners are reporting the effect doesn't last longer than a year or so. Elite will do XPEL Fusion PPF (which includes the ceramic), but will charge the same as doing XPEL Ultimate Plus and coating with ceramic on top. PFS is not recommending that at all, just XPEL Ultimate Plus and ceramic coating on top.
7. Paint correction: Elite stated that for a new car, they would not be doing any paint correction unless there was holograms, which he described as an extreme version of swirl marks. Since he felt this wouldn't apply in the Emira's case, we didn't discuss pricing. In contrast PFS offers three levels of paint correction, 1-step, 2-step, and 3-step at various price points. In this case PFS felt that the Emira would only require level 1, which is described as "quick buff/polish" for $450. Could choose to have the dealer do this for free as part of their normal prep, depending on your level of comfort with that, or have the dealer do very minimal prep (wash only) and have PFS do the 1-step for a fee.
8. PFS threw me a bit of a curve when they let me know their full body PPF doesn't include the rear diffuser because the complexity makes it very time consuming. So that's an additional $500. To "soften" that blow, they are "discounting" their regular full body PPF price by $500 to $6800. So $7300 for the whole car plus rear diffuser. But now, I'm not sure if Elite's $6995 includes the rear diffusor or not as it was not discussed.
9. Elite's shop is tidy and secure and the cars were impressive. But PFS was just bonkers over the top. Their small room was probably three times the size of Elite's, and then there's the BIG room. Among the various and "sundry" higher end Porsches and Lambos, I saw a GT3 RS and a Carrera GT (same owner according to the shop owner), a Maybach SUV, and an extremely rare hypercar that I wasn't allowed to photograph. Previously it's been reported these guys did Leno's McLaren F1 and they've also been featured by Shmee on YouTube in various capacities. It was an impressive visit to say the least.
10. PFS also had no hesitation in what they told me on badge removal. They are removed. Period. Including the letters. They will replace them with a template which will insure perfect placement. Good answer.
10. PFS had one Emira that had been dropped off a day before and had already been prepped and started PPF. Both of the side badges had already been removed. I wasn't able to see the relief cuts on the sides as those pieces had not been installed yet. But was was taken aback by how much orange peel I saw on this Nimbus Gray. At first I thought it was the PPF, but I looked at the panels that had not received PPF and still saw what looked like a lot to me. Not sure if it was the lighting inside or not. In contrast, I saw NO such orange peel on @T6061 's Osmium silver car outside in the parking lot, it was gorgeous. So not sure if it was the paint difference, the lighting difference, difference in when these two cars were produced or if I'm just crazy. (strike that last one, because I AM crazy usually).
Hopefully some of this could be useful to some of you, and I would definitely recommending visiting as many shops as you can on your short list. It's a large investment and hard to fix once all is said and done if you choose poorly. This week has led me to some conclusions I wouldn't have reached otherwise. Lastly I've now compiled our collective knowledge in a Google spreadsheet which I'll attempt to share in my footer. If this works, it should be editable by all. I encourage you to consider it a living document and please contribute information as you get it. I've saved a copy local in case all goes wrong with this shared version.
1. It's definitely worth visiting the shops directly if you can. Only so much can be gleaned by just looking at pricing or talking on the phone. A lot of this for me is coming down to the feel you get about the different shops and their level of expertise.
2. All 3 shops that I know something about now (Elite, PFS, and One-of-One) use the templates which they oversize to fully wrap the edges. All therefore will use the relief cuts, and all agree they are necessary to avoid the film from lifting. Some may approach this slightly differently. For instance Elite told me in some cases they can reduce the size of the relief cuts with no impact on the lifting issue (although I'm not sure or convinced how they could know this until they actually try it).
3. All 3 of these shops seemed to be HIGHLY skilled at what they do. In fact, Elite had high praise for One-of-One and even commented that if they felt the need to "respect" the relief cuts in the template, it was for a very good reason. Additionally when I visited Elite and met with two of their installers, one of them was working on a GT4 wing on a tabletop, and was meticulously butting film edges. It was apparent that anything less than perfection was not going to be acceptable to him. The owner also suggested that on the Emira, they would want to fill the relief cut behind the intake with film as it appears to be in a more visible area. He showed me similar cuts on the front cap of that same Porsche where they chose not to fill due to it being in a less visible location.
4. Elite is a small shop, one room about 4 cars are so being worked on. There were two installers and the owner Craig, who spent a good deal of time with me.
5. Craig mentioned that on the Emira they already did, they deleted the hole in the template for the front badge, laid it over the badge and cut around it very closely, rather than remove the badge. Since they only did front PPF on this car, they didn't touch the side emblems but for full PPF he mentioned that they would do the same For the letters on the back, he said they would remove them, but depending on how that "turned out" I might have to order new letters, which I was not happy to hear. He also told me Lotus hand places the letters so they can be slightly different on different cars, so they photograph before removal and hand replace, without using a template. That answer left me with some discomfort.
6. Elite and PFS are not fans of films with embedded ceramic, even XPEL's version. They feel it's too new and owners are reporting the effect doesn't last longer than a year or so. Elite will do XPEL Fusion PPF (which includes the ceramic), but will charge the same as doing XPEL Ultimate Plus and coating with ceramic on top. PFS is not recommending that at all, just XPEL Ultimate Plus and ceramic coating on top.
7. Paint correction: Elite stated that for a new car, they would not be doing any paint correction unless there was holograms, which he described as an extreme version of swirl marks. Since he felt this wouldn't apply in the Emira's case, we didn't discuss pricing. In contrast PFS offers three levels of paint correction, 1-step, 2-step, and 3-step at various price points. In this case PFS felt that the Emira would only require level 1, which is described as "quick buff/polish" for $450. Could choose to have the dealer do this for free as part of their normal prep, depending on your level of comfort with that, or have the dealer do very minimal prep (wash only) and have PFS do the 1-step for a fee.
8. PFS threw me a bit of a curve when they let me know their full body PPF doesn't include the rear diffuser because the complexity makes it very time consuming. So that's an additional $500. To "soften" that blow, they are "discounting" their regular full body PPF price by $500 to $6800. So $7300 for the whole car plus rear diffuser. But now, I'm not sure if Elite's $6995 includes the rear diffusor or not as it was not discussed.
9. Elite's shop is tidy and secure and the cars were impressive. But PFS was just bonkers over the top. Their small room was probably three times the size of Elite's, and then there's the BIG room. Among the various and "sundry" higher end Porsches and Lambos, I saw a GT3 RS and a Carrera GT (same owner according to the shop owner), a Maybach SUV, and an extremely rare hypercar that I wasn't allowed to photograph. Previously it's been reported these guys did Leno's McLaren F1 and they've also been featured by Shmee on YouTube in various capacities. It was an impressive visit to say the least.
10. PFS also had no hesitation in what they told me on badge removal. They are removed. Period. Including the letters. They will replace them with a template which will insure perfect placement. Good answer.
10. PFS had one Emira that had been dropped off a day before and had already been prepped and started PPF. Both of the side badges had already been removed. I wasn't able to see the relief cuts on the sides as those pieces had not been installed yet. But was was taken aback by how much orange peel I saw on this Nimbus Gray. At first I thought it was the PPF, but I looked at the panels that had not received PPF and still saw what looked like a lot to me. Not sure if it was the lighting inside or not. In contrast, I saw NO such orange peel on @T6061 's Osmium silver car outside in the parking lot, it was gorgeous. So not sure if it was the paint difference, the lighting difference, difference in when these two cars were produced or if I'm just crazy. (strike that last one, because I AM crazy usually).
Hopefully some of this could be useful to some of you, and I would definitely recommending visiting as many shops as you can on your short list. It's a large investment and hard to fix once all is said and done if you choose poorly. This week has led me to some conclusions I wouldn't have reached otherwise. Lastly I've now compiled our collective knowledge in a Google spreadsheet which I'll attempt to share in my footer. If this works, it should be editable by all. I encourage you to consider it a living document and please contribute information as you get it. I've saved a copy local in case all goes wrong with this shared version.
Last edited:
- Thread starter
- #55
Check out the spreadsheet linked in my footer
thx! This is great!
- Thread starter
- #58
Please contribute as you learn more info on these or other places to help fill in the blanks for all of us. The spreadsheet should be editable by all. Please let me know if any issues, my first time with doing this on the forum.
Update from last post:
I end up canceling my appointment with MAGIC WRAPZ do to numerous negative reviews on horrible workmanship so I did some research and found place called TECHNIC AUTO SPA in Alhambra.
I was on a phone call with guy name Teddy for some time and decided to drop my car off this coming Monday.
Full body stek PPF including wheels
Ceramic coats
Interior ceramic coating
Ceramic window tinting
I'll post some pics and review when it's done.
I end up canceling my appointment with MAGIC WRAPZ do to numerous negative reviews on horrible workmanship so I did some research and found place called TECHNIC AUTO SPA in Alhambra.
I was on a phone call with guy name Teddy for some time and decided to drop my car off this coming Monday.
Full body stek PPF including wheels
Ceramic coats
Interior ceramic coating
Ceramic window tinting
I'll post some pics and review when it's done.
Nice! Can you add this info with costs to the spreadsheet? I plan on using STEK again for my film.
Btw, are most people just driving it to the shop to get it done or towing it to avoid getting paint damage?
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