Touch-up Pens

How to use one of these? I just bought one of these and tried it on a scratch, it became too blobby and ran off and make like a bigger and worse looking streak. What's the best way to deal with a medium-deep scratches?

Other urls found in this thread:

drcolorchip.com/
youtube.com/watch?v=2nYF46P7B2c
youtube.com/watch?v=6xi3xmeO6C4
archive.4plebs.org/o/thread/15406966/looks-like-oil-change-companies-sell#p15461808
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

Just don't press down on the pen so hard and if you have a brush end try using the brush.

Lightly apply coats, and then apply your clear. There's no exact science for a newbie, it's not easy and you'll fuck up a lot. Just keep trying

I had two fucking chips in my door and I managed to touch it up. You can still see it up close but from a distance you can't tell. It's far from perfect but you're not gonna get perfect with a touch up pen. Also be sure to clean your surface

wait a minute are those chips or holes in the wall. Either way cant tell. Alright Ill try to do that then, thanks and wish me luck

A touch up pen is the cheapest solution and you get what you pay for.

tip a little bit in a plastic lid and use a toothpick to fill the hole

What about those big-ass gashes?

maybe buy some fine art brushes or something from an art store and some chemical to wash them in so they dont dry up.

>wash them in so they dont dry up
literally what?

In past threads about touchup at edmunds.com user forums, people transfer the touch up paint onto a toothpick. Then dab the toothpick into the tiny thin scratch or pebble chip.

Also mentioned were the toothpick's several advantages over a brush.

1. The tip pushes the paint firmly onto the surface. Thus there isn't any air, grime, or grit in the way of the paint making full contact with all the interior surfaces of the crack or chip.

2. Neatness. A toothpick has better guidance in thin lines or small chips than a brush.

3. No cleanup. Throw away the toothpick when done.

4. Toothpicks are cheaper than brushes.

5. You can store the toothpicks and touchup paint pen or tiny bottle in a baggie. Brushes must be stored carefully without bending the brush head.

6. Toothpicks have versatile sizes. If the sharp tip is too small, mash it down on a clean surface to make it wider.

-x.x.x.x.

Some people at edmunds.com used hypodermic needles to dispense paint if there are many chips to take care of at once. Just put the needle into the paint bottle and suck up just a tiny bit of pain. Then dispense the paint and use a toothpick to make the paint level and smooth in each chip or scratch. Because the paint is stored in the hypo, it doesn't dry out while you deal with each individual scratch or chip. One user described that preferred #20 needles.

If you're the wrx faggot, GET IT REPAINTED. It's a new car and it needs to be pristine.

b-but muh $300

im so confused. pls respond

300 bucks isn't bad at all.

drcolorchip.com/

That's for prepping a chipped and scratched up car before you sell it on craig's list. Short term cosmetic repair.

>How to use one of these?
Normally I get paint from the dealer's part's department, but since you have white, most things will work since that is the underside of the car in your picture. Thus, my advice is provided with that in mind.

Non-residue cleaner
Toothpicks
Bottle cap or small piece of aluminum foil
Paper towel
water

Before applying paint, you need to clean the surfaces with a non-residue cleaner. If you have waxes and other silicon oils on the paint, you should thoroughly remove that stuff from the area you are painting. Wiping with windex several times followed by isopropyl alcohol several times works. Use a new small piece of paper towel each time.

>I bought one of these and tried it on a scratch, it became too blobby
Shake up the paint and use the brush to put a dab on the bottle cap or the aluminum foil. Seal the paint bottle back up.

>and ran off and make like a bigger and worse looking streak. What's the best way to deal with a medium-deep scratches?
Dip the toothpick with a slight rolling motion in your fingers to cover the tip all around. Touch just the tip to an unpainted area and lightly but firmly stroke the paint thinly into the scratch area. Lower the angle of your toothpick to let more of the paint from the toothpick touch the scratch. Then stroke the paint into the crack.

If you've clayed, then you know how to parallel stroke the surface. Take a clean paper towel. One sheet thick about 1/4 of a full sheet. Stroke it across the crack lightly and very parallel to the surface. That pulls off the paint outside of the crack area.

Repeat above as necessary on other cracks. I cannot say the surface of your car will look as smooth as this girl's skin, but it should be close enough.

>im so confused. pls respond
There's no need to have a formal repaint even for a new WRX. Not for that bit of scratching on the underside. Touch up paint is all that is needed.

>maybe buy some fine art brushes
Squirrel hair or sable hair brushes are wasted and their light touch is undesirable for car surfaces. The firm touch of a toothpick tip ensures the paint gets down to the very bottom of the crack and touches the plastic layer and paint edges instead of floating on top of grime, grit, or polymer oil from waxing.

Detailer here. If you aren't going to wet sand and buff out the smaller imperfections first, then buy a detail fountain pen and just drip the touch up into the pen and apply it like you're writing on paper basically.

JUST

HOLY SHIT IT LOOKS WORSE THAN BEFORE

and take a pic of it 5 feet away at a normal viewing angle and you'll be surprised how no one gives a fuck.

...

If you want a decent finish don't worry about paint excess.
You'll have to wet sand it after and polish it properly.

>HOLY SHIT IT LOOKS WORSE THAN BEFORE

That's what happens from not following advice and doing it with lazy shortcuts and brushes.

He literally only needs to wet sand it and polish it now.
lol

I used toothpicks though. Took me all day

Can any detailer do it?

i could of had the same result in like 9 seconds

Do this you nigger. Do you have a rotary buffer?

Yes, but you can do it.
youtube.com/watch?v=2nYF46P7B2c

He doesn't apply touch-up paint, but it's the same principle.

Nope, never used a buffer before

Oh ok, how much would that set me back in doing it from a professional?

No idea, really. Depends where you live.
Maybe 50 burgerbucks or something like that.

Overfilling is not good. That's why that advice mentioned the parallel wipe. It also gets rid of any residue outside the crack area.

Touch up with toothpick is fairly fast and doesn't take hours for those cracks. I guess "first time jitters" uncertainty has a lot to do with it.

The advantage of knowing where the crack is makes it easy to correct. Dull edge of xacto and scrape out the mistaken fill in the crack and do it again. It's not like the crack will get any wider if you correct the over fill. Then you refill the scraped area as before but more conservatively with paint. Not so much.

>I used toothpicks though. Took me all day
If you were local to me, I'd show you how it is done in minutes for all the scratches in your OP picture with both the hypo or toothpick/cap method.

It just requires a deft eye hand coordination from being used to touching up. You learn not to put too much on the toothpick or blob things up. If there is too much on the car, take a clean toothpick and pull the excess off. That is common sense right? No sense leaving too much on when it is so easy to pull the excess off.

As for color matching, that is why I get the bottle of touchup paint from the dealer. Matching colors is especially hard with silver or generic white. Some cars have dull white, oyster white, arctic white, pearlescent white, metallic white, bluish white, or that really brilliant white with brighteners in it. So picking a generic brand white might result in a compromise off white.

And if you make a mistake by blobbing on too much for a toothpick to pull off, or it spills over on the adjacent surface, do the parallel wipe with the clean paper towel. It should be taut in your hand so it presents a tight and slightly curved surface as you stroke across the top of the paint while not pushing the towel into the crevice. If you've done claying while in the zone, then that is just what it is like.

Damn, wish I knew this earlier. So now how do I salvage this mess? The same sandpaper polish detailer option that tripfriend suggested?

youtube.com/watch?v=6xi3xmeO6C4

great video or your money back

seriously its a comfy af video, watch this shit.

Nice. The end product pleases my autism. So the best remedy is sandpaper+polish?

>sandpaper polish
Not a fan of damaging surrounding area. Apply polish after the paint is cured. Never when paint is soft because polish has solvents

You saw where the correction could be done by using the dull edge of something like an xacto and scraping the bad part out of the scratch?

Wash hands. Always wash hands. So many people have grimy greasy hands and cross contaminate what they work on. I assume you use the standard "round" toothpicks and not those cheap shaved slivers.

If the blobby paint is still soft, you can scrape it off with toothpick. Hold toothpick mostly parallel to surface and stroke along the scratch (not across it). Rotate the toothpick to present a new surface as needed.

Don't scrape deep. Don't scrape wide.

If the blobby paint is hard, then instead of toothpick, it is Xacto metal time. What you do is scrape at right angles across the top of the blob with the backside of the xacto blade (rectangular edge, not the bladed side). If you have dental plaque tools, use that.

If the paint is still sort of soft, you can burnish whatever still sticks out with the back of your fingernail. Softly. Then you can scrape out some of it with a toothpick. Burnish the edges down with a toothpick and let it finish drying.

At that point you still have a scratch but less deep. Apply more paint later but don't blob it all in one spot. A little bit on the tip. Dab it in. Get more on the tip, dab to a new spot in the scratch. Now stroke the tip of the toothpick to even out both dabs. See how that evened out without any blob above the surface level of the scratch?

Once you get the feel of that, you can quickly dip the tip of toothpick in the paint you daubed on the bottlecap or foil and then dab to the crack. You might even have 5 dabs down before you begin the stroking once your confidence is up. Don't have too many dabs going before you start stroking though. It's better to have too small a dab than too much

>So the best remedy is sandpaper+polish?
There's all kinds of approaches that are "best". That's because different people have different definitions of what "best" means.

The standard "best" for a new car is to take it to a body shop. Thus a few scratches can cost $300 since they will simply fill in the scratches to be ABOVE the surface slightly and then wetsand it down level. Then they polish as the final correction. Of course, that means you have thinner clearcoat in all the surrounding area. That's not a problem if not too much was polished off, but you never know if someone is in a rush to get your job over with.

I prefer to fill in scratches and chips myself and it saves a lot of money and also avoids getting a damage report on the carfax / alldata / etcetera history of damages to the car. Whenever you use a service, those things get recorded to databases.

archive.4plebs.org/o/thread/15406966/looks-like-oil-change-companies-sell#p15461808

I try to make as few changes as possible to the non-damaged areas. So my polishing is brief and localized. I don't use large rotary buffers because those affect a large area. My favorite is to use an old battery powered buffer tool. I used to build scale models and this is a remnant from those old days. It only touches a very small area. That's how I like it.

How would you tackle my fuckup

m8 I botched up one of the supposedly easiest things to do, would a noob like me be able to do what you just described?

>Waaaah faggotmobile got a boo-boo

>How would you tackle my fuckup
I've given descriptions.

I can't keep typing forever repeating the same things. This isn't a USA high school. I like to say it once and trust in your reading comprehension to see all the words. It would have been easier if I was your next door neighbor and I just dart over and touch up. Of course, I still have my model kit painting tools from my scale model resin kit days. But using toothpicks is perfectly fine.

You also have all those different youtube videos to look at. If you go to that one youtube URL, you will see on the side a lot other related touch up videos to look at. They all have their methods. Some like to use a lot of polish and power tools. As for me, I believe in conserving as much of the original clear coat as possible. Certainly, the future years will do something to try to wear it down.

>I botched up one of the supposedly easiest things to do

It's not easy if you don't have patience. I have a friend that would get frustrated on a keyboard and then start pressing random keys and pressing return. Clicking on files and clicking on yes to delete. Just out of random frustration. Then he wonders why the system is messed up. And he gets madder and madder.

If you lose patience and just blob it on. Of course it looks like a blob. You saw the words in where it said "...stroke the paint thinly into the scratch area...." or did you simply skim over all the words only seeing what you felt like seeing? That is the USA high school style of reading the lazy ass teachers encourage now. It trains kids to be superficial at reading instructions. I remember being a TA and grading exams and wondering how can college kids be so superficial at reading the problem description? It's like they skipped all the words or numbers they didn't like and then only used what they wanted to see. No wonder their answer is wrong. And they got that from the high school and middle school and elementary schools that prepped them to be that way. Lazy teachers always demanding smaller class sizes yet turning out students who know less than students from the old days with class sizes of 50 students for one teacher.

If you missed seeing the word "thin" in that post, then read all the posts again but without skimming the words or skipping over them. I don't want to write a 540RAT oil blog where he repeats the same thing multiple times. Evidently, he got tired of repeating answering questions asking things that were in the blog to begin with.

While I sound upset and may seem wrong. It's because I remember my classes, and compare experiences to those of the kids in my neighborhood as they grew up. And the daughter of my friend also had lots of stories of her high school. One highschool class the teacher simply put in a disney movie DVD.....

>Can any detailer do it?

Anyone including porch monkeys will take your money if you wave it under their nose. But you only have simple scratches, so you should handle it yourself.

>How to use one of these?
A little at a time to a scratch.
If you have Q-tips that use paper sticks, break one end off and use the stick end to put paint into the scratch.

You fucking idiot, you were supposed to tape up the border of the scratches. Get some buffing compound quick!

>I have a friend that would get frustrated on a keyboard and then start pressing random keys and pressing return. Clicking on files and clicking on yes to delete. Just out of random frustration. Then he wonders why the system is messed up. And he gets madder and madder.

Lmao are you comparing me to a sperg? Pic related is what I did, I did my best not to blob anything. Now I see what you're saying and all but I did not "pick and choose" I literally did the relevant instructions (also cleaned with isopropyl beforehand) so I don't see what reading comprehension has to do with this. What I do see however, is a buttmad TA who probably uses the little power he has in that position to give people shit grades.

The standard "best" is to take it to a body shop. How bad does it look on a carfax that a brand spankin new car had to get a bumper resprayed?

I was originally going to get it done from the stealership but I later found out they don't do it themselves, they take it to another bodyshop down the street.

If I used the Xacto on the clearcoat will it mess it up? One of the main problems is that I applied the clearcoat already so sanding it down will go to the point of no return whereas painting on top of the clearcoat will fuck shit up further.

If anything, I don't mean to shit on you guys for helping I really appreciate it but it sounds like paint fetishists jacking themselves off
>muh i gots me a old battery buffer tool
>muh reading comprehenshun

They're scrapes down to the plastic. I tried to handle it myself but fucked, so scraping seems to be the only viable alternative

what about sandpaper

...

>If I used the Xacto on the clearcoat will it mess it up?

You're not using it on the clearcoat. It is only to scrape off any part of the blob that rises above the surface of the adjacent undamaged clearcoated paint. You are just trying to get the surface as level as possible before doing further action in that post.

It doesn't have to be xactor. Anything that can scrape that surface AND which you have good hand eye coordination will work. Your goal is to scrape only the blob and none of the undamaged clearcoated paint.

As those instructions went, it seems that you would scrape off the majority of the blob that way. Then you could go about scraping the blob directly so that the center part of the blob was finally lower than the adjacent surface. Then you could go about refilling the scratch but much more gradually.

So why bother scraping the blob first and then the scratch? Why not just go right to scraping the scratch? That's because the poster assumed your blob had a dome-like shape. Thus, there would be some slightly higher blobbing at the edge of the scratch right next to the undamaged paint. If you simply started scratching in the middle of the blob to lower it, you would end up with a furrow in the middle of the blob.

>I really appreciate it but it sounds like paint fetishists jacking themselves off

They don't look like paint fetishists. Those would be much more strident and insist you use color matching and pre-prep edging.

You have a variety of people posting. Some use the "let the insurance take care of it" which means a shop does it at high cost. Bollocks on that.

Then you have the paint it and use power tool to polish the blob down. That causes a lot of wear to adjacent clearcoat which is not necessary. Bollocks to that.

Then you have the poster who liked toothpick and bottle cap, but stopped at saying more.

Then you have the guy who liked toothpick and wrote a lot of stuff to try to make sure you didn't go down the wrong path. There was a lot of thoughtfulness in those posts. He could be identified by his use of the japanese race queen girls. Moar girls please.

Then you have the irate poster who thought you were the typical careless usa high school graduate. There's a lot of justification for that way of thinking unfortunately. The usa isn't what it used to be. Your buffoon Trump has touched on that legit nerve with the make america great again theme.

By the time the anime girl friend gave his input the damage was already done

The one issue with body shop is they might fuck it up worse

>The one issue with body shop is they might fuck it up worse

Body Shops use the "Correction" approach. That means they would touch up the cracks to make them level along with feathering clearcoat on the spot. Then they would use a mild polishing abrasive (aka "polish") and an orbital to make the whole area smooth and undetectable.

The problem about Correction is that the clearcoat of the otherwise unaffected (aka unscratched) area is thinned down. But by doing this, the customer doesn't complain because he cannot see any difference. Having no complaints is more important to the shop than preserving the thickness of the clearcoat for the future.

That's because insurance companies will adjust the rates they pay based on complaints. The more complaints, the lower the scale (plateau basis). And if too many complaints, they can be dropped. So the body shops the Correction approach just like some professional detailers do when they remove swirls by Correction.

What about muh carfax and the record showing that there was work done barely 2 weeks after purchase?

PROTIP: apply it just enough to fill the scratch then wait for it to dry, then wet sand and buff it to remove the excess so it looks perfect.

Another PROTIP: don't fucking use clear coat on your fucking car ever, just fill in the scratch with the touch up paint.
Any clear you spray on will be nowhere near as durable as the clear on the car, it will fade and peel off within a year leaving your car looking like literal trash.
Never ever use and can products on your car, anything sprayed on a car should be a 2K product which means 2 parts, activator and paint.
Anything else is a waste of time.

The clearcoat came with the touchup paint. looked something like this