This is kind of a crazy question.

I stripped and painted the air cleaner base. It's correct semi-gloss black and it looks really good. Except...

That part is extremely hard to paint because of all of the holes, bends, and angles. Well mostly the visible parts turned out very, very well. But one drip fell on the top of the left snorkel and there is just a little orange peel adjacent to the left snorkel.

I am prepared to repaint the parts that are not perfect. But I got to thinking. If I struggled to get the paint just right, I'll bet the original painter did too. Do any of you guys know if this or similar parts were dead perfect or did Chevy let a few dribbles or orange peel slide by? I know there were drips on the frame and less than perfect paint behind the rear wheels, for instance.

This is not looking for an excuse to do a crap restoration job. It is an honest question about how things may have been done 44 years ago. And, could my quest for perfection make my restoration, well, less perfect?

Air cleaners were made and painted by outside vendors. Were they perfect? No....but they were certainly better than the stuff that GM actually DID paint.  Any "defects" in the paint would most likely been on the bottom side of the base. Any runs would have been on the bottom edge, not on the top of the snorkel.
If you're trying to get it "correct" for Judging, then you might want to sand the run out on the top, and respray it. Otherwise, just paint it to where it looks good to YOU.

I'm restoring the steering column and gear on a much older chevy.  I painted the column yesterday, and got one small run up at the top, more of a wave.  I was going to leave it until my son said, "sure it will be easy to pull it out again if you don't like how it looks."  Since it was such a pain to remove it, I decided to resand and respray as it will bug me later if I don't.

That's the question for you, can you really live with the current result?

Jim