About to touch up paint

My black '98 has paint that is generally in good shape, but there are isolated sections where the clear coat has failed and cracked and no amount of restoration effort by me has helped. I've decided to sand down and repaint those areas, but I'm worried that I'm going to be very unhappy with the results. I figure it hs got to look better if I do a careful job. Probably, it will look great from a distance and not so great up close. Being black, though, I'm hoping the paint difference between the old and repainted areas won't be too noticble. I've ordered the OEM shade of black from paintscratch.com and am almost ready to begin.

Has anyone done something similar to their Riv?

I started working on mine by signing up for an adult evening body shop class at my local voc-tech high school. I highly recommend this route, as they can teach you how to sand, wet-sand, spray, and you can usually use the spray booth to bake it when you are painting. My Riv started rusting because some meathead had caulked the molding on behind the pass. door panel (in front of the rear wheel) after doing some kind of body repair, and it trapped water and started to rust. I was able to scrape all of the caulk out, and grind all the rust away, straighten some of the metal and re-fill the whole area, and came out with a much better result. Unfortunately it's all primer right now, but when the school class starts up again in the fall I will continue doing my Riv one panel at a time....

Only about 4% of my paint needs redone. I think I am going to practice on some scrap parts first. I will take pictures and document my effort for posterity.

Chicken wrote:

OK, I get the joke. I should use a magic marker. Ha, ha.

Chicken wrote:

OK, that one is pretty funny.

Actually I've been told Black is the easiest color to touch up, there aren't too many different shades of BLACK! It will be the clear that will give you problems, you have to clear the whole panel for it to come out right.