Car Touch Up Paint – Everything You Wanted To Know and Were Afraid To Ask!

: The Ultimate Car Paint Repair Bundle

Click HERE Get the Car Touch Up Paint bundle Pro’s Pray you don’t find out about!

If you have determined your scratch is more a “gouge” or scrape and requires car touch up paint there are some things you must understand about the process. Once you understand a few secrets, doing really nice car touch up paint repairs yourself will be a snap!

If you are still not sure if you will need car touch up paint to make the area look nice again check out this post.

There are a lot of misconceptions about how…to do car touch up paint repairs.

Believe me I have seen it all…the amount of totally wrong and bogus information on the internet on how to do car touch up paint repairs is shocking.

First understand there is a fundamental difference between removing scratches and car touch up paint repairs.

1. Removing Scratches – you are really REMOVING the scratch!

You are actually removing a microscopic amount of clear coat in order to get the surface flat again. Thus you have removed the defect that was causing the reflection…a scratch!

Scratch In Top Clear Coat Layer Can Be Removed

Modern 2 stage paint finish - Color layer with protective clear coat on top.

Modern cars since about 1990 have a two stage paint finish. A 2 stage paint finish consists of a color base coat then a top coat of hard clear urethane. (primer bottom layer not considered here)

Typically scratches that DO NOT penetrate to the color layer can be removed.

A car scratch in the clear coat is very similar to the facets in a diamond…light hits the edges and reflects. This is EXACTLY what is happening with a clear coat scratch, the sharp edge of the scratch in the clear coat top surface is reflecting light at you!

2. Car Touch Up Paint Repairs – you are actually ADDING to the scratch to “remove” it.

Sounds weird huh? You can not “remove” a deep scratch, chip or scrape because to flatten it out would require wet sanding excessively and you would make a even bigger “sore thumb”. So you need to “camouflage” the scratch to get it to “visually disappear” into the surrounding paint finish when you are doing car touch up paint repairs.

There are many secrets (that are easy to learn) that will make the car touch up paint repair “visually disappear” when you stand at a normal viewing distance of about 2 feet. Even the best hand touch up paint pros can not make a hand car touch up paint repair invisible…but they can do them so nice you will never notice unless you put your nose in it.

… with the right techniques you can do car touch up paint repairs by hand with professional results.

Find out how to get everything you need in one box so you can do awesome professional car touch up paint repairs!

First off you are adding paint to “build up” the scrape, or slightly higher than the level of the surrounding paint. This is because the scrape is so deep it would be impossible to “flatten” it out without removing the color base coat…this would be bummersville.

Car Touch Up Paint Required For Deep Scratch

Deep Scratch filled with car touch up paint

To do a convincing car touch up paint repair you must surgically add paint to the scrape, chip or scratch. This is a case where too much is NOT a good thing. The more paint you apply to a scrape the more it stands out like a sore thumb!

In the car touch up paint videos on this website also show advanced techniques to further enhance a touch up paint repair…the same types of techniques a professional might use to do a “virtually” invisible touch up paint repair.

Also understand professional “tricks” are all aimed at camouflaging a car touch up paint repair to make it visually blend into the surrounding area.

To get pro looking final results when doing car touch up paint repairs you MUST first apply the paint with surgical precision.

NEVER EVER use the brush on a bottle of touch up paint. It will apply WAY too much paint and do it in a very messy way. BLOBSVILLE!

You may have heard the term “blob”. I hate this word…it’s EXACTLY WHAT YOU DON’T WANT after you lay down the paint. One reason this term “blob” came about is by consumers, innocently, using the useless brush on a bottle of OEM paint when doing car touch up paint repairs.

What you ended up with is a big ugly BLOB of paint making the scratch, chip or scrape saying, “Look at me, look at me…I’m a big ugly BLOB of touch up paint!”

10 times out of 10 folks will just leave the big ugly blob not knowing that to do next, for a nice looking car touch up paint repair, so they do nothing. It takes VERY LITTLE paint to actually do a pro looking car paint touch up.

There are several techniques pro’s use to achieve a great looking car touch up paint repair…none are rocket science, all are easily learned with a good video and a little practice. They are covered in videos on this site and future articles.

Understand no touch up paint repair, applied by hand, is invisible, not even a Pro can do that.

However with a few tricks you can make a car touch up paint repair be undetectable from a normal viewing distance (2-3 feet away), which is what a Pro shoots for. This type of car touch up paint repair can save you easily $300 – $1000.00+ when compared to taking it to a body shop and having entire panels resprayed.

There are other tricks a Pro can use to make a car touch up paint repair “visually disappear”. Polishing entire defect area plus the surrounding area to a high luster will also go long way to help the car touch up paint “ visually disappear”. The car touch up paint repair VISUALLY disappears because your eyes are tricked by the luster (shininess) of the surrounding area.