Car Touch Up Paint – Everything You You Need – To Do It Right!
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!
There are a lot of misconceptions about how…to do car touch up paint application.
Believe me I have seen it all…the amount of totally wrong and bogus information on the internet on how to do auto touch up paint repairs is shocking.
First Understand There Is A Fundamental Difference Between Removing Scratches And Car Touch Up Paint Repairs.
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!
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 auto 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 automotive 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 apply automobile touch up paint by hand with professional results.
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 paint
To do a convincing fix 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!
The videos on this website also show advanced techniques to further enhance a touch up repairs…the same types of techniques a professional might use to do a “virtually” invisible repair.
Also understand professional “tricks” are all aimed at camouflaging a touch up paint repair to make it visually blend into the surrounding area.
To get pro looking final results doing 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 automobile touch up paint fix.
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 repair, so they do nothing. It takes VERY LITTLE paint to actually do a pro looking touch up.
There are several techniques pro’s use to achieve a great looking touch up…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 vehicle touch up paint job be undetectable from a normal viewing distance (2-3 feet away), which is what a Pro shoots for. This type of 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 result “ visually disappear”. The automotive touch up paint repair VISUALLY disappears because your eyes are tricked by the luster (shine) of the surrounding area.
Tags: CAR TOUCH, car touch up, car touch up paint, touch up paint, touch up paint results
