Best place to buy a Painted Hood?

Well I see you're in Michigan used to be the car capital of the world how far is your Prius hood going to have to ship to your address I ordered a metal hood from carparts.com It was out of stock for months during the pandemic this is a car that wasn't worthy of a $500 aluminum hood The hood arrived from carparts.com with dents in it The hood was only $130 to begin with luckily the car blew up a generation 3 and I didn't even need to use the hood but certainly trying to get warranty from carparts.com and so on and on and on and on would have been certainly no fun I sold the hood to another guy who put it on his car fix the little small dime size dimples in it himself and had his buddy at the paint shop paint it You can't tell it from anything else until you lift it It's heavier than the aluminum. I see a whole bunch of places offering the service absolutely I just wonder about how that really turns out for people. Some of the shipping that I've seen done is either extremely expensive or very shoddy and you have dents or damage. Carparts.com for an aluminum hood they wanted $190 to ship the thing It doesn't weigh anything and it's not outside of anybody's package size for shipping but yet if I buy it from the bumper guy here locally He can bring me the same part from China with no shipping for $140.

 

I'd probably just have a local body shop work it.

Mostly because there can be slight variations in paint finishes that were independently matched back to a code.

When the guy doing the actual paint has the opportunity to sample the actual weathered paint on the car, they can do a closer match.

That way it doesn't look like you just got a big piece of your car from the internet.

 

I’d suspect most body shops, at least the ones trying to do a “perfect” match, would paint the hood on the car, and blend in all adjacent panels, a process where the feather out the paint gradually, by thinning till they’re practically shooting clear.

Using that technique, you cannot tell it’s a repaint, even if it’s not a perfect colour match.

 

Also consider sanding the hood down and priming it yourself for a perfect surface and then either getting it wrapped or painted. By doing the prep work yourself and bringing only the hood in, not the whole car you can lower the total cost.