Fixing a New Car Scratch with Touch-Up Paint
You’re opening the car door. You glance down at the fender and you see it — A SCRATCH! You mutter under your breath “THIS is why I can’t have anything nice” as your new car lays damaged before you. But fear not! It can be fixed.
ABSOLUTELY NOT! Touch-up paint is one of the worst things you can do.
Don’t get me wrong – if you have a big, deep scratch, touch-up paint is probably appropriate. But I don’t recommend that an average person uses it. First of all, it’s very hard to apply correctly unless you’re experienced. Second of all, it’s usually overkill. There are other methods of reducing the appearance of a scratch that are easy and relatively cheap.
For a light scratch, a wet sand is the preferred method. Basically, the paint is sanded with rubbing compound and the surface molecules of the paint are reorganized to fill the scratch and make it disappear. Provided your scratch isn’t deep, this is the way to fix it.
How do you know if you have a deep scratch? Can you feel it with your fingernail? Is bare metal showing? Is the scratch longer than 10″? If you can answer any of these questions with a yes, go to the local body shop. Make sure to get a written guarantee and a few quotes — repairing a deep or big scratch can cost anywhere from $50 to $1000 dollars, so check around.
If the answer to both of the questions above is “no”, then you’ve got a light scratch in your new car and fixing it is easy. Go to a local body shop, preferable one with a written guarantee, and ask them for an estimate. Expect to pay around $40.
Finally, make sure you realize that either one of the above methods will greatly diminish the appearance of the scratch, but the scratch can’t truly be “fixed”. It’s never going to look the way it did before. Hopefully though it will be too hard for anyone else to see it and no one will know about it but you.
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