Auto body repair & detailing: Blending basecoat/clearcoat, rear quarter panel, panel painting

Question
I have refinished a lot of cars totally and complete panel painting, but have never blended one..say a fender into a door. In order to get proper adhesion, how do you blend into the door? If you sand it lightly (break the shine on old clearcoat) wouldn't you end up with a line where the blend adheres to where you overlap and stop after buffing? (new color and clear come off during buffing?) if you let your clear go past the color blend you can't scuff or the scratches would come through the clear I would think or will the clear and color adhere to unsanded surface?

Answer
Hi Jim,

The recommendation for blending base-coat / clear-coat is to blend the base-coat color into the adjacent panels and clear-coat the whole blended panel. You will need to prep the complete blend panel with 800 to 1000 grit by wet sanding and blend the color into the panel and  clear-coat the complete panel. This avoids having a clear-coat edge and 2 coats of the clear-coat should fill in the sand scratches easily.

There are some techniques that would allow the clear-coat to also be blended into the panel but it's not really a good idea for a repair that needs to be durable. I only recommend blending clear-coat in extremely limited situations. Sometimes if you are working on a classic car that has a great paint job with exception of a small needed repair, I would consider blending the clear-coat if it's on like a rear quarter panel or something like that.