I've done things a little different from the crowd, I think. There may be others who have taken my route but I haven't heard any chatter about it. So I'm assuming I'm alone.
Basically, I filled the cleaned and filled the parting lines on my MKIII with a couple of rounds of body filler and smoothed it down. Then I painted the whole thing with "hot rod" primer. I've been driving that way for a little over 1000 miles. It really is hard to get back to work after you've been exposed to driving this thing. But I have to get paint on it soon. So I started a few days ago with the orbital sander and took off the primer coat. I had almost forgotten what the filler pattern looked like but I could pretty much feel the defects which are mostly flat spots in the fair curve. I started on the nose as that is the most noticeable place on the car and worked around the headlights and then along the tops of the fenders back to the wind screen. So now I have sort of reached a dilemma that I wasn't expecting. I seem to have a pretty nice curve on the areas that were obviously not right. It's gotten to the point where now I can't really tell if I have a defect or not. I have used two or three thin filler coats and in some places a putty coat on the edges that seems to really help. But my problem is now I can't really tell if it is perfect or if there is still a small area to work some more. Part of the problem is I haven't sanded with fine enough paper to make the entire surface feel the same. So I guess the friction can change from point to point on the curve. It's hard to tell how smooth it really is. I'm going to sand the entire area with 220 and then 320 and give it a primer coat hoping that will at least make the surface feel consistent.
So my question and request is: do any of your body guys out there have any tricks to help when the body work starts to get to the point where you just can't feel the flat spots any more? (How do you know when to quit?) I was considering painting the surfaces with gloss black after the primer as black reveals all bad things. But I don't know if it is time to do that yet. I might have a heart attack if I get to much "bad news". BTW, I haven't done any wet sanding yet.
Thank you in advance,
WEK.