Being locked down in London is a good excuse to tinker with my car. I finally swapped out the left rear overrider, from which the cracked and dried out rubber buffer was pulling ever further away from the top, for a spare from my parts stash. That had been bugging me for ages!
Then I smugly went for a drive, and promptly scraped my nearside rear door and the lip of the rear arch against the extra-wide heavy duty rear step bumper of a rakishly parked security van. A few inches of paint cracked and flaked off, down to the metal. The box section bumper on the armoured van was, of course, unblemished!
Turns out the painters used a great deal of filler on my doors! I sanded both damaged areas back to clean shiny metal, and applied two thickly brushed coats of Presto BOB 2 primer. Then I moved round to the offside, where I'd done a similarly silly thing some years ago. I hadn't promptly fixed that scrape, so water has got behind the primer and begun to corrode the metal. Fortunately, what I feared would very possibly be a hole in the wing from the inside turned out to just be exterior surface corrosion, where the paint had cracked and allowed the elements in. I've sanded it back until the rust was removed and applied a brush on rust treatment that turns the shiny steel a purplish blue. It almost looks like Admiralty Blue! Tomorrow I'll apply a thick layer of the grey primer, and move on to sorting out the bottom of the offside rear door... I'm working up the courage to look at where the paint on the offside front wing has bubbled and cracked right at the top behind the sidelight tell-tale. That looks like the hardest shape to fill and sand.
Once I've completed the filling and sanding I'm going to have a go at touching in the repaired areas with the small amount of blue paint I have left over. I'm thinking about brushing it on and polishing it back, rather than spraying, as I don't have a compressor and air brush. How far should I overlap the undamaged paintwork with the new brushed coats, so as to be able to buff it back smooth? How long should I leave the newly applied paint to harden, or cure, or whatever the terminology is, before attempting polishing? Anybody on here got experience at DIY car painting with 2K?