Help Needed.. Repairing, Painting cracks in front apron
 

Hello,

I am repairing some cracks in my front Aero Kit apron after hitting a large cat at 65mph.:mad:

I have JB Welded the cracks together at the back of the apron. In the front I've filled in the cracks with putty and sanded everything down. So far so good.

Last night I taped off a few square inch area and primed it with flexible primer. Then I spray painted over the primer with matching chili red. It took about 5 coats to cover the primer.

Here's the hard part. After removing the newspaper and tape, I have paint lines where the repaired area is built up with 6 coats of primer/paint and the surrounding area is still the perfectly good clearcoat.

My question is how do I blend the repaired area into the surrounding area as far as leveling it out before applying my clearcoat? If I sand down the edges that will create scratches that I'll have to paint over, which would overspray onto the good existing clearcoat. I could see this project moving out and out and out until I have to repaint the entire bumper! Help!

Steve

Feathering the paint rather than spraying up tight to the mask would have been best.

As long as your final sanding is with an appropriate grit (like 2000 or some rubbing compound) the new clear will fill any scratches in your old clear. Just feather it as you overlap into the old clear and you should be ok.

TooTall,

Final sanding of the basecoat? It took 5 layers to cover the primer, so it built up thick against the tape. Should I mask it further away from the damage I guess? I just didn't want a bunch of overspray where I didn't need it.

You're going to have to feather a very broad area. For example, damage the size of a dime needs to be feathered to an area larger than a softball. I would sand down the raised edges and repaint and feather more. Never paint up to your masking.

Yup. As Brad says, never paint up to your masking. One trick I have done that worked pretty well was to cut a hole in a piece of cardstock and use that between my airbrush and the repair, holding it about halfway between each, and move it a little as I sprayed - like dodging or burning in an exposure in a photo darkroom if you have any experience there.

if i may repeat... never paint up to the masking. this is the first mistake
i made when repairing a dime sized scratch in my old wrx. broad coating
is best... and the trick is more in the sanding/polishing rather than
painting imho.

i ended up doing the repair 5-6 times until i finally got it to where it was
quite smooth for an amature. :)