Hi -
Needed to replace my roof-mounted carphone aerial recently, after it lost a fight with a low-hanging branch. Decided to mount the replacement further back on clean undisturbed steel, and do a filler repair on the distorted hole left by the old one. I managed a lovely smooth repair with mesh-reinforced Plastic Padding, sanded off with 1200 wet & dry. Went out and bought a specially-mixed exact-match aerosol of dark blue paint, but now I just can't get any kind of half-decent paint finish over it.
I masked off the area (approx playing card sized), and applied about 6-8 light sprays (with 10min intervals to allow it to go tacky). Left this for a week to harden off, and you could easily see boundaries where one spray run had overlapped another etc. Got the metallic T-Cut out to blend it yesterday, only to find that this removed the colour layer! I was just left with a really weird silvery / undercoaty patch.
Tried to spray again today, but I can't apply it softly enough to avoid obvious layers. I assume that this will mean polishing again, which will remove the colour again. The area needing respray is now an inch wider on all sides, and it's going to grow each time I get it wrong.
A quick scamper around google suggests that it's practically impossible to spray a small section of car body, especially with a standard aerosol can, and the whole panel usually has to be redone. Can't believe this - surely there's some way to get a *reasonable* finish? I don't want concours, just a smooth, more or less matching result.
I'm now torn between buying a little airbrush kit to see if an accurate, gentle & slow application works any better, or else calling in one of those cosmetic repair firms from the yellow pages.
Any advice would be gratefully appreciated!
Thanks - Steve