Rubdown...

After my massage therapy session earlier in the afternoon, I drove the short distance to the paint shop for yet another status check on Sergio and I saw a similar task getting done on him.  He was getting a good body rubbing although in his case, it was with sand paper and water instead of oil.  This wet-sanding should be the last step before restoring the car's final surface finish via a rubdown.  Part of what wet-sanding achieves is to remove the extra blobs and drippings of paint which occur during spraying, in addition to any other accumulated surface imperfections.  It then becomes a matter of bringing out the shine through fine grit rubbing compound.

One of my observations was that the color has now taken on a darker tone, much closer to the original than when first sprayed.  My initial impression of the paint was that the shade was more obviously blue than the blue-black I was expecting.  This can be seen from the picture above: the color before wet-sanding is the shiny blue strip in the middle / the original factory shade is the area above where the sticker is posted / and the bottom-most part shows the result after wet-sanding.  Not that the new color turned out bad, but in keeping with the goal of sticking to the original, it was a noticeable variation.  The master painter reassured me that this will change as the work progresses and true enough, I no longer doubt that it will be the case.  I really have to reinforce the notion that painting is more art than science.  A reasonably mechanically inclined person with basic tools and a repair manual on hand can do spark plug changes and the like, as these are standardized procedures.  But painting requires judgement and experience which no amount of theoretical knowledge will compensate for.

Now for the bad news.  It seems that I had been overly optimistic in my estimate of having the car back by the middle of the month.  In the excitement of seeing the body almost finished,  I totally forgot that the engine compartment, wheelwells, and a few other tedious spots will also be repainted.  I only realized this today because the engine bay was being cleaned of all the oil and dirt in preparation for spraying.  The wheelwells have not even been touched so far but this should be a relatively easy phase to complete.  The tedious part will be small nooks and crannies to be attended to like the magwheels, grilles, bumpers, mouldings and even the wiper arms among others.  So which points to everything being done by the end of the month instead.

I hope...