Car Paint Repair – Paint repair options range from simple tinted waxes and As Seen On TV miracle pens to multi-step treatments matched to the exact color of your car. As someone who can use a wrench, I went with the latter and tested the Automotive Touchup kit on my marked 1993 Ford Bronco. It costs about $50 depending on the supplies you need, compared to $5,000 with for professional repainting. This collection of aerosol cans and sandpaper is as close as you can get to an appointment at the paint booth. Here’s how it works, and whether it’s worth it.
Unless the car you are repairing is less than 20 years old or was custom painted, the paint is almost certainly a clear-coated catalytic enamel. Artificially hardened by toxic chemicals, it is stable within hours of factory application.
Car Paint Repair
On the other hand, the paint you are applying is a lacquer, whether it is a primer, color or clear. Lacquer dries because the solvent absorbs, leaving the solids behind. Although they feel hard and will be sandable within a few minutes, they will continue to shrink for a while. Let your lacquers dry at least overnight so they can shrink before you add another coat. If you need multiple coats to build the paint film to full thickness for a repair, one coat per day is best. Of course, be safe. The amounts of solvents used are small, but work in a well-ventilated area. Be sure to degrease the area with solvent before you begin.
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Somewhere on your car there should be the factory paint code, probably on a sticker or metal plaque under the hood or on the door sill. This will go a long way in finding the right touch.
If you can’t match the color to the touch-up paint display at the auto parts store, the next step, although expensive, is the parts counter at the car dealer, at least if you have a car that’s less than 10 to 15 years. your age.
If you’re really stumped, a paint dealer can auto-mix you to custom pints; Take an example, like the gas cap or a mirror. I’ve also found some great matches from expresspaint.com and their motorcycle counterpart, color-rite.com, where you can mail order pens and touch-up bottles, aerosol cans or quarts or larger matching paint cans.
Minor streaks, ones that don’t penetrate the clear coat into the color, or areas with a low gloss texture or orange peel can often be buffed out with a compound. Yes, this removes some of the clear coat, so buff the minimum area necessary or you’ll have to reapply some of that top protective layer. Clean the panel thoroughly after removing the abrasive compound.
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You will need to get matching paint. The same procedure can be used to repair primer coat scratches by first brushing on a layer of primer, then sanding off the excess until it just covers the base of the scratch. Don’t skip that step: You’ll end up with poor adhesion and/or rust.
As with any serious touch kit, there are many factors involved. The box for my black Bronco (color code M1724A) includes prep solvent, rubbing compound, sandpaper of various grits, rubber gloves, backing rags to pick up dust, pre-taped plastic to block messy overspray (like blue painter’s tape for your car), and cans of primer, base coat, and clear coat.
It all suggests a lot of work, which turns out to be accurate. I watch one of the videos on how to do Automotive Touchup and print out the instructions. I take everything outside, then pick out the ugliest scratches and rust spots on the hood. I treat them with the solvent and rag, then perimeter tape to protect my Eddie Bauer fender badge.
It feels wrong to push into your fender with a folded piece of 180-grit, but that’s what you have to do. You make the scratch much, much worse before you make it better. I get big, horrible white blotches on the Bronco’s fender, door, hood and rear quarter panel. But it is cathartic, in a way, to grind down to bare metal in the name of making your car beautiful again.
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On to the sprays. The first is the standard black-tinted primer. It fills in the sand scores with something similar to the original black, immediately putting me at ease.
I add a total of three coats to the metal, waiting five to ten minutes for each to dry before applying the next. Here’s the current theme of touchwork: Spend two minutes painting and then ten minutes waiting to paint another two minutes.
In this way, a man could, hypothetically, consume several Implementation Foundations All Day in the course of a job.
Primer gives way to base coat, which means more aerosol cans. Seal each application in the pigment and protective layers below. Between sprays, you sand with finer paper.
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Finally, you wet-sand with 1, 500-grit, which feels smoother than a sheet of construction paper. At each interval, you get closer to a factory-finish polish. The last clear coat finishes your work with a shiny shell.
The clear coat dries overnight, and I hit my handiwork with the rub compound to bring out the shine. And it promises, which brings me to an unexpected dilemma: The touch-up looks better than the original paint.
Nine coats of new paint definitely looks better than years of factory black. For the whole job, I say, success. In fact, too much success. The instructions say that an all-over wax will help blend it out. Last step: Give hell with the orbital buffer and hope it mixes.
Of course, if you’re not going to prep and paint an entire section of your car, you can try a scratch product like Meguiar’s ScratchX 2.0.
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Check out two parts of a thoroughly scratched Ford tailgate. The right was treated with Scratch X, the left is how the whole thing looked before. It can’t address the deeper chips and scratches, but the light stuff is eradicated and returned to glossy black.
To fix a deep scratch without going into a full repaint, you can also try a paint pen. This corner of my Bronco looks like it was buffed with an angle grinder, so I bought a Dupli-Color Paint Pen to try to improve the situation.
The paint pen comes with an abrasive tip so you can rough up the surface to accept paint. Depending on your car, you may be able to match your exact paint code. But I figured with 26 year old paint, it wasn’t an exact match of itself anyway, so I went with Universal Black.
My brush work may leave something to be desired (you can use a pen tip for finer scratches, or a brush for larger gouges) but this part looks 100 percent better than which was before him. Give it a few coats and some wax and it will definitely improve the look – and protect the metal.
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Senior editor and columnist. He is now based in North Carolina but still remembers how to turn right. He has a 2009 GEM e4 and drove 206 mph once. Those facts are mutually exclusive.
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This Portable Jump Starter is 26% Off on Amazon Best Labor Day Tire Sale of 2024 Automotive Touch Up Paint 101 The 8 Best Portable Jump Starters No matter how careful you are, it’s only a matter of time before your car gets , truck or SUV to scratch paint first, paint chip or paint scrape. Whether it’s a careless act in a Madison WI parking lot or a lost rock on the road, you’ll eventually find yourself looking for auto scratch repair advice.
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You might think that scratching the paint is an easy project to do yourself. If you’ve tried it, you know that fixing scratches on a car is harder than it seems. Fixing scratches and scrapes on cars and trucks was something you would try in your own garage ten years ago. But today’s vehicles have sophisticated paints and clear coats. To do the job right you not only need the right materials and tools, you need training, skill and experience.
“I like my car to look new and scratches and dents bother me. Auto Color always leaves a new surface finish.”
In the “old days” you would get a small bottle of paint that was supposed to match your manufacturer’s specifications and apply it to the scratch. Underestimating the complexity of what used to be a simple arrangement has disastrous results. Covering a scratch in a modern finish often involves everything from filling in the scratch or scrape to sanding and buffing before applying paint. Then there are techniques for doing the paint matching. You don’t want your prized vehicle to look like it’s “patched,” right?
Whether your car is just days out of the dealer’s showroom or 10 years old, dings, paint chips and scratches are inevitable.