You know how it goes, you go out to take the kids to the park because you can't face them rampaging about inside any longer, you mooch down the road and notice some random bits of paper on the parcel shelf of an otherwise nondescript vehicle, so you wander over to see what it might be...

Yeah, its a for sale sign, printed and bunged in a plastic wallet. hmmm. step back and examine the vehicle in question...

Ultimate white goods motoring. Like if you gave a gifted 6 year old a crayon and piece of paper and asked them to draw a bland hatchback. Brilliant. Lets have a closer look shall we?

Thats right, a 2004 Daewoo Lacetti. You know when a luxury manufacturer gets panned for using parts bin things, like stalks from a golf fitted to a maserati? Imagine if you made the entire car from things you pinched from GM's parts bin. This would be it.

Anyway, it was advertised for £750, has done 41k miles and has ticket to the end of the year. Its got a 1.6 litre engine and an autobox. The engine is the same (I think) as a contemporary Astra? GM Family 1 engine built under licence in Korea?

We went out today and checked it out for space (it needs to fit 2 adults, a 9 year old and (critically) a 9 month old baby with all the associated paraphenalia. An equivalent year Focus or Astra within 25 miles were at least a grand, and thats for a leggy one with a worrying MOT history. Having confirmed various baby seats and bases do indeed fit, and that you can actually get the buggy in the boot and some shopping or whatever, I took it for a test drive. It drives alright, though the 'service' that the current owner paid for last November along with the MOT clearly did not include either oil (black, below 'low' on the dipstick) or coolant (none in the expansion tank, though no sign of HGF and both top and bottom hoses got warm after the test drive so fingers crossed).

We shook on £700 on the basis it is due a cambelt based on age, though its only done 11k since its last one in 2013. The guy reckoned he'd had it done and has gone to find the paperwork to support this. Its got full service history up to 2013 and based on my under-bonnet findings may not have been serviced since. I'll give it a seeing to once its ours tomorrow and top the oil and coolant up, drive it about a bit then change the oil properly, along with filters and whatnot.

Inside its alright, very clean and tidy with such luxuries (LX, you know) as a CD player and electric windows, plus AC which I'm not sure if it works. The only thing he knew for sure didn't work was the digital clock which keeps resetting itself to 4.21 for reasons unknown. I might see if I can fix this, the display is fine but the 'brains' are a bit wonky it seems

With the wife and one of the kids out today, and it not actually raining (yet) I took it upon myself to sort out the paintwork on the rear passenger wheelarch. You've seen what it looked like when we got it, and driving it about in the salt and muck on the roads hasn't improved things. we begin here

Not pretty. I'm not quite sure what the previous owner did to it, the door itself is utterly unmarked and the rust is only on the surface so it must be quite recent. It looks like they've cut a corner too sharp, but that'd have hit the door. All I can think of is that they tried to reverse round a corner with the door open, misjudged it and scraped the arch. its very odd.

I gave it a wipe over with a damp sponge, then dried it with a cloth to get the road muck off to begin with. Then gave it a rough sand over the whole area with some glass paper then 400 grit wet n dry to give the paint a half decent key.

First up I needed to grind back the rust and take off any flaky paint. Last time I did something like this I used a brass wire brush head in my drill, this was OK but didn't seem to take off all the rust. This time I deployed heavier weapons

My Einhell grinder with an Aldi steel wire wheel attachment. This made seriously short work of the paint and rust! Potentially overkill, certainly if you do this be aware it removes paint and rust incredibly quickly, a gentle pass and its back to clean metal

While I was kneeling on the ground cleaning it up with a cloth to get the bits off, I noticed that the damage goes quite a bit further than I originally thought. Its cracked all round the metal bit of the arch, so I fired up the grinder again and chased it all round. You can just see the start of the cracked paint in the top right of the second picture above.

Here we are with all the rusty bits and flaky paint ground off. given another year or two this would have been quite crispy I suspect so glad I've caught it now. I broke out the proven rust neutralising choice Vactan for the next bit.

Painted it on with a brush. The instructions say to paint it on 40 microns thick. I made sure* I was using my 40 micron paintbrush for this. I left it 25 minutes and went to have a look at it

It was touch dry so I carefully painted on another coat

And left it for about an hour and a bit. I think when it goes purple its sort of cured? Anyway, I had to take a load of old junk to the local dump so thought a drive along would help dry it out some more.

When I got back I gave it all a gentle rub with the abrasive side of a washing up sponge to remove the painted on Vactan from the paint. It doesn't stick to the paint very well, even though I'd roughened it up with abrasive paper beforehand and as I was going to prime it next I wanted to make sure any flaky bits came off.

I used the same paintbrush I'd put the vactan on with to paint some Zinc182 hi-zinc primer onto the whole area.

Obvs it looks bloody awful here, the primer needs to dry, then I'll sand it down so its smoothed off, than see if it wants another coat or not. it goes on pretty thick so I hope I'll get away with just the one coat but we'll see. The benefit of the thick primer is it should fill the scrapes in the paint and potentially avoids the need for filler. 

The next morning the sun was shining and there was hardly any breeze. Perfect painting weather.

The primer seemed pretty dry to me, having had 18 hours to dry off with no rain. Next it needed to be flatted back as it had been applied with a paintbrush. I got out the 400-grit wet n dry paper and a bucket.

First pass, still needed more smoothing down

Second pass, much better. Not perfect but definitely in 'that'll do' territory. I'd covered the wheel up with an old cot blanket ready for the next stage. Paint.

First of all I tested the paint on a bit of cardboard in case they'd mislabelled it and it was actually Dynorod orange or something else humorous. Looks good to me.

Then first proper pass over it,

Not brilliant, but not bad. Colour is alright. A few more coats with 20 ish minutes in between to let it dry

Rolled back into the sun to dry out better

and a close up

I left it about 4 hours to dry in the sun and breeze then had a go at flatting it back with the wet n dry. This worked pretty well again, getting the runs out of it and not actually going through the paint

Not too bad. To be honest, what it really wanted was some filler to make it perfect, but its a horrible shape with a ridge running round about 1" from the arch lip. I've never done filler before and didn't fancy learning on a panel like this to be honest. Maybe with an expertly cut cork block it might be OK but I had no cork blocks and am definitely not an expert. This improves the look about 80% with materials I actually know how to use - at least at a basic level.

Having flatted it back, cleaned it with a microfibre cloth and re-covered the wheel, I set to with the lacquer. Here is the final result of the full resprayed area. TBH it looks better from 6 feet than 3 feet but there. Its better now than it was when I started I reckon

As you can see there was a fair bit of overspray, I should have masked it better but that's what meths and an old rag is for. its still a bit speckly but I ran out of my ancient meths so I'll get some more and try cleaning it better another weekend. I might give it another coat of lacquer too but not decided. its had two coats of Vactan, two of zinc primer, 5 coats of white and 3 coats of lacquer. Still a bit biffed in, but from 6 feet is hardly noticeable and this should at least stop the rust. I suspect untreated it'd have been pretty bad in a couple more years TBH. Living a couple of miles from the sea, and with the amount of salt the local roads get from October to March it wasn't going to fix itself.

This is probably the biggest, and most visible area I have taken back to bare metal, treated, primed and painted. If I had more time and ability I'd have liked to put some filler in and recreate the shape but I'd have never been able to get the radius right. At least this looks honest (he says...)