How likely is it that a detailer could blend small repainted areas by wetsanding?

[Contradiction]

Hi everyone,



I am frankly not at all a detailer, so I'm looking for advice before I bring my car to one in the future and have them do a professional wet sand and detail.



So I just picked up a 1984 VW Rabbit GTI with single stage enamel OEM paint.



At this point I am all about preservation of the original paint of the car even though I recognize that all though there are areas that are certainly not perfect; the original paint is in such good condition that I would rather do my best to have it preserved and claim that it is such rather then respraying the car.



I have a few minor problem areas that I can see, but overall 95% of the car is rust free and not bubbling, etc. So I'm wondering how likely it would be for a body shop to be able to very sparingly paint some trouble areas and have a professional detailer wet sand and buff the car out afterward.



Here are the problem areas with pictures:



The base of the passenger side mirror has the worst of it present:

The door sills on both sides have their share of chips similar to this. This to me looks like the easiest area to inconspicuously repair because there is rubber trim right beneath it and a minor tape line at that point would probably go unnoticed:

The car must have backed into something at one point and the rear valance is damaged and I can see surface rust on the edge of the seams (common for these cars to begin with). Not sure if I want to have them try and straighten this back out and respray it from the bottom of the bumper or not. The good part is it's not a very visible area of the car either:

There is some surface rust underneath one of the wheel flares. I'm going to do something brave and scary this weekend and remove those to see how bad it is on all 4.



So as you can see it has some issues, but the greater majority of the car has fairly glossy, non-oxidized paint that is totally saveable.



So what I'm wondering is how likely is it that a body shop could put down as little paint as possible to get some coverage on these areas, and have the detailer blend this back out with wet sanding?



I know that conventionally the rule of thumb for body work and blending paint to get an even match is to paint the entire panel, and then feather into the surrounding panels to insure a proper match. But in this case I'm hoping that they can apply it sparingly and give the detailer something to work with. I know this goes against every rule of traditional body work, but I'm hoping that it could be approached from a "preservation" and "touch up spraying" angle and not a traditional respray method.



So given what I have said are my expectations realistic?



Could a good detailer really blend minor sprayed touch ups with wetsanding or am I just nuts for thinking this?

 

[Accumulator]

Contradiction- Cool car, and I applaud your desire to keep it as original as possible.



You need to find a *GOOD* body/paint guy who knows how to do this sort of preservation work. He'll need to find the correct single stage paint, which is getting harder every day. Don't take it to a "regular" bodyshop or they'll just mess it up.



I've handled my '85 Jag the exact same way. I waited *decades* to have certain things attended to because it took me that long to find the right guy (luckily I wasn't dealing with your degree of rust, so I could wait that long) and I'm glad I did as it turned out great.



If that were mine and I didn't have my "good" guy, I'd find some way to arrest the rust and just live with it being cosmetically imperfect. Some of that rust is gonna be worse than I think you're expecting, but I'm pretty sure it could be arrested OK at this point.



Oh, and you need to be a little careful about wetsanding single stage enamel, sometimes it doesn't "come back" with compounding the way single stage lacquer will. Don't know how the VW paint is in this regard though.