[MPWR]

There are sort of two camps on painting and polishing.

One is to build up a thick layer of paint, and then sand/polish it out with sequential grades of micromesh. Some people have terrific results this way- but the sanding process is slow, tedious, and horribly painstaking (you have to cover EVERY spot consistently with EVERY grade of abrasive). If you sand through to the primer or plastic (which is nearly inevitable for me) there is no good way to correct, and often the haze of scratches from the initial sanding never really disappears.

The other approach is to apply the paint in many light layers, and sand the paint after each layer. By the final layer, all texture and flaws have been eliminated. It takes 1-2 hours for the paint to outgas after spraying a layer of paint, so this is not a rapid way to paint. But I find it much easier to fix problems this way as they happen. I usually apply a minimum of 4-6 layers of paint, and often go to 8-10. After the paint is opaque I move on to clearcoat, which gets applied the same way. I usually apply 8-12 layers of clearcoat, and gently polish it afterwards with ScratchX.

I tis completely OK to sand metallic paints, as long as you do not sand the final layer. So get all the other layers perfect, and apply a light final mistcoat last of all.