Just saw this thread. Awesome that you have a 75 copper car! As you know it was a one-year color and is one of the rarest of all the 914 colors. I went through the VIN registry a while back and estimated that there were probably less than 20 left, at least in the US.
Not at all bragging - because it is a source of great pain
- I may have more experience than anyone on the planet with Copper Metallic paint/wraps. I painted my 914 twice with L99K (first color coat didn't take, had to sand, reprime, respray, reclear). That's the one in the classifieds. I also own a - wait for it - copper wrapped 968. No joke.
Copper Metallic L99K is a really hard color to spray. The metallic likes to mottle and it's got to be sprayed under near-perfect conditions to avoid that. If I were to do it again I would go with super high grade basecoat - like Glasurit 90. The upside is that, for some reason, this color runs cheap. IIRC, it's only like 3-4 components so it's not hard for the supplier to mix.
3m makes a Liquid Copper wrap in their 1080 grade which is really really nice. It's more orange than L99K but it's probably close enough for a driver. I had it on my 968 3 years and it wore extremely well in the PNW winter.
Wrapping well is REALLY hard. If you have not done it before it is NOTHING like the youtube videos. The stuff sticks to everything; it tears; it color shifts when you try to heat it. OTOH, it's REALLY cheap compared with paint. You can get 75 feet of 3M 1080 wrap on Amazon for less than half what you would pay for just color & clear alone. So when you screw up, you just pull it off and start over. On that car, you could leave it on forever because you're not exactly worried about what's going to happen to the paint when you take it off.
If you go for it, I would vote to try wrapping. If you spray it, estimate about $800-$1K for materials if you go PPG on the low end (color and clear), much more if you go Glasurit etc. Of course Maaco is a different story... not a terrible idea really if its a driver and you do the prep yourself... It was over 200 hours of work prepping and painting my car.
Here's a mottled respray - this is 6 coats of color and 4 clear - mottling is purely due to technique not prep or coverage:
Click to view attachmentHere's the corrected respray (did I mention this car is for sale?
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Click to view attachmentFor purposes of comparison - this is my 968 (it's no longer that color and I did NOT do the wrap myself):
Click to view attachment