Looking good man! haha, I never thought about the manual from automatic column thing until today. Glad you do the work you do, its pretty budget minded and awesome
really I have no money invested into it because I already had everything laying around but if you were to do it yourself and buy everything.
you would be looking at buying a quart of bondo ($8.00),some sand paper ($4.00),you could use rattle can primer ($3.00),grinding/cutoff disc for a grinder or drill ($3.00),masking tape ($2.00),and a quart of satin black paint ($6.00)....so for roughly around $25.00ish you could do this project
or if you have everything already like I did than you will have nothing but time invested into it. ...I currently have about 5 hours or so into the job so far and about another hour left to go....I am sure it could be done in less but I like to take my time and make sure I get a good finish the first time so I don't have to worry about fixing a screw up.