All right. So we're going to touch up this deep key scratch in the front fender of this BMW X5. Here's a before and after.
Now, I just wanna make a point. Most of the touch up paint that you buy on the internet is very watery. It's very over reduced and it makes it very difficult to do an advanced touch up technique, like we're gonna see.
So the Ultimate Car Scratch Remover System Touch Up Paint Kit comes with a high grade urethane paint and it's not reduced. And you can see it has a much better consistency and is excellent for this type of repair job.
So this panel has been polished and all the clear coat scratches and all the minor scratches have all been reduced. So we've got really good reflectance, which is really important for the final result. So I call this the dab 'n smear, basically, you're just taking a glove finger, put it in your touch up paint. Work along the scratch, smearing it in.
You don't wanna play with it too much, just one or two swipes. And you're kind of using your finger to kind of squeegy it into the scratch.
Now, this was taken outdoors in bright sunlight, and it was about 70 degrees F you want to do this in the shade. We did this for photography purposes so that would show up really well. When you do the dab 'n smear technique and you're smearing like this, the paint dries almost instantly. So we can see here, we've gone along.
This is the first pass and this one area in here is the extreme, deep part in the scratch. And you can see the scratch is still kind of showing. Whereas the part of the scratch on the right hand side there has gotten completely filled up. So it might require that we do a second pass of paint.
So, this is the paint leveling solvent. And the technique that you wanna do is remove as much of the excess on either side of the scratch without actually touching the scratch just yet. The more you play with the touch up paint with the solvent, the higher, the likelihood that you're gonna pull all the paint out of the scratch, and then just have to redo the process.
So as you can see, I'm, I'm working on either side of the scratch and removing all of the excess touch up paint, or as much as I can just kind of getting right up to the edge there.
Now you can see all the excess paint that's on this microfiber shammy. So I'm pulling it up and finding kind of a fresh area. And there's enough solvent that's on this now that I can still work on either side of the edge. So I'm still cleaning up excess.
Now I'm starting to actually pull a little bit of the paint or erode the paint on the scratch itself.
And I'm just using a light brushing motion across.
And I'm treating different parts of the scratch a little differently, you know, as we saw in the that one image, you know, this scratch has varying degrees of depth where, you know, it's super deep in some areas, in some areas it's a little more shallow. That's why you don't want to treat the entire scratch area exactly the same. If you were to use the same pressure along the whole thing, some of the parts of the scratch that are very shallow you might pull the paint completely out of it, whereas the really deep parts, the paint would still stay in. So you just have to be aware of the scratch and, and just kind of finesse it and be a little more gentle on the shallow areas.
And you can be a little bit more aggressive on the deeper area. The great thing about this technique is you almost can't do it wrong. If you pull all the paint outta the scratch, you just simply clean it up and get as much of the excess off as you can, and just reapply, smear the paint back on it and then try it again.
In fact, if you have really deep scratch areas, you may have to apply paint two to three times until you completely fill the scratch.
Now I can see here, I'm actually going in and really with precision getting some areas and kind of pushing that microfiber shammy up and just getting some places where there's a little bit excess, still there without touching too much of the scratch. You can see I've taken this microfiber shammy and kind of rolled it into a couple rolls and I don't have the backup card anymore and I'm just finessing the scratch and removing that excess.
Once again, I'm just getting right up to the edge of that scratch and getting the excess off without actually touching the scratch or touching it the least amount necessary. So here we've got our, before, this nasty key scratch and here is our after, looks awesome. Now this picture is actually really close to it, which is not, wouldn't even be a normal viewing distance.
This was like maybe 18 inches away and right at the fender well height in normal viewing distance would be you'd stand, be standing up and you'd probably be three feet away. So at this distance, we have our noses in it and you can just barely pick it out. But at three feet away in a normal viewing distance, this is totally undetectable.