First off, I'd like to welcome you to the forum! sorry your post stirred up so much aggravation on the vintage forum, so I moved your thread to the proper place for your car! I also weeded out the aggrivating posts and threw them into open discussion for those guys to argue.
this is not the forum for argumentative responses!

If just swapping out the calipers for $950 dollars as the OP suggested:

As a customer, "fair" would be 2 hours labor and a 20% mark-up on parts.

As a shop owner, "fair" appears to be 4 hours labor and a 100% mark-up on parts.


From what has been recently stated, you'd be lucky to get just the parts for that $800 dollars. Tack on another $500 for labor and that is what a local shop near me would want to do that job. $1300 sound like a fair price to you?

I guess it all depends on how you define "fair" and from who's prospective. As a "shade tree mechanic", using decent quality parts, I could do that job for $400 parts(retail) and 3-4 hrs labor.

That sounds great, and the better customers tend to not nitpick every estimate and/or invoice.

We always save the old parts for "show and tell", and every car gets one or two test drives depending on what it was here for.

As for the op, the price sounds a little high. I suspect that flex hoses,rotors and pads are being done at the same time and some regions have pretty high labor rates as well.

The last youngtimer we worked on('81 240D) needed all 20 of the rotor to hub bolts because someone had buggered them all up with an impact. It takes longer, but we use thee lug nuts and clamp the hub to a vise and use a torque wrench. The same car had egg shaped outer wheel bearings because they had been dropped on the floor at some point. That's why we simply don't just throw calipers on and bleed the brakes like one poster suggested should take .5 hours per side. The liability is too great, and we don't do hack repairs by replacing calipers only. We inspect the entire brake system and make up an estimate based on what it takes to bring the entire brake system up to par.

Don't get me started on the phenolic caliper pistons used on domestics, I won't replace pads without doing calipers on those.

I agree with your list of parts and labor there. however, the OP said needed calipers. until we know what was the reason, and what is being replaced with the calipers, we have no idea how fair the price is, or even if it needs doing.
he might have 4 seized pistons, and blown flex lines, and gouged rotors, and etc etc.

One thing we do on all reman calipers we install is to crack the bleeder screws BEFORE we put them on the car. For some reason, rebuilders use no packing materials in the oversize boxes and many times the bleeder screw is fractured.

where are you getting your calipers?
most of mine come to me with the bleeders in a bag...