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The last coat...everything looking beautiful...and then I pulled the tape off:

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Sheeet happens. But not all is lost. The beauty of your paint job is that you can simply re-roll the area back up to level of the rest of the panel... with appropriate sanding between coats to work the edges together. And once you get it up to a point where it has successfully merged physically and visually... just go and give a light sanding to the entire section and lay one final coat over the section being worked on.

That is one of the nice things about the roller method... in that booboo's like this are completely within your ability to repair. No need to rush to the body shop where such a booboo on a 'real paint' job would cost $800 bucks or more to repair. Instead, you take a little time, your handy tray of paint and your trusty roller and you can remedy the booboo yourself.

But I must admit it is a bit of a bummer when something boggles up what appears to be an otherwise successful paint.

But also think of it this way... booboo's happen in parking lots where some lunkhead might back into a door and scrape the paint... or some jerko kids might run a key on your paint job. The difference now is that it is just going to cost you a bit of time to remedy instead of having to take out a bank loan to restore things back to the level you had it at prior to the booboo.

One thing you should take note of :

a ) don't ever use that brand of body tape again. It sounds like it has a nasty and unforgiving adhesion. Get the good stuff through a body shop jobber or auto parts depot. Don't buy any automotive tape that says 'Made in China' or 'Made in Mexico'

b ) I agree with the other suggestion about running a cloth dampened with mineral spirits on it to try to weaken the adhesion of the tape. BUT sometimes the outer layer of the tape is fairly impermeable, even by mineral spirit. In that case you have two possible alternatives...

a ) leave the car out in the bright hot sun and hopefully the heat of the sun will weaken the adhesion factor of the tape... OR
b ) take your wife's blow dryer and gently heat up the tape as you try to remove it. Again the idea being to lessen the bond of the tape to the paint.

Good luck...

marq