a few years back we did a video on how to touch up your front bumper and basically that video
was the basics of how to use your typical oem pen we'll give you a refresher in a minute but
a lot of people in that video asked what are the limits of touch-up paint you know how far
can you go to make a touch-up paint look really really good in that video we showed you just the
basics of how to apply it as kind of a band-aid to fix some very very small scratches and chips
but if you want to actually make it look as good as possible there's a lot more to
it than just hitting it with a brush and today we're going to show you how
so unfortunately when driving home from ponies and smokies this happened to my show we got two
small chips on the pillar but this is the kind of thing you want to fix with touch-up paint
i've seen people do larger sections and try to it's just never ever going to look right you're
trying to cover a large section basically rule of thumb it comes with a brush if you have to
actually use a brush stroke to fill the scratch you're probably getting the point that it's
too large now longer scratches can be a little different because you can still make them look
better but you're never going to be able to blend that properly so that's kind of thing it probably
needs to be repainted but something like this is perfect for touch-up paint this is going to be
your typical touch-up paint pen now we carry these for all the ford colors and also all the mopar
colors i got a couple different things you can do here when you pop this cap off got this fine
tip pen this is going to be used for very very fine scratches and if you actually unthread this
and you have an actual brush in here with more color on it and when you flip it over
that's going to be your clear coat so literally they give you everything right in this pen
now before again we showed you the basis of touching it up today we'll show you how to
take it a step further and make it look even more oem than a normal touch-up job
so first thing we're actually just going to clean the area
we're always going to get more fingerprints on it but we want to start with a clean surface
like i said you unthread this
there is your touch-up brush and then out here you have a pen hold it down
push down and paint will come out again this is going to be for your smaller touch-up we're
going to use a brush for the larger touch up and then finally you have this little cap on
here this is basically just to clean out the opening where the paint is missing so
it makes a better touch up just like in real full-size painting of cars prep is what makes
the difference between a good touch up and a bad touch-up job again same thing we're gonna
use that for prep but again we'll get to that in a minute and then use this you'll actually hear it
basically allows you to clean this surface this thing is like a small little piece of sandpaper
so if that tip didn't get it clean enough you're still going to feel edges you don't
want any really hard edges so now we use a little bit of wet sandpaper sweat the area
and again just use a little pressure right around the chips
basically get it so you don't feel any kind of a sharp edge
now we're going to wipe it off this will be kind of scary if you've never done it before because
the surface is going to be very dull looking it's going to look like you damaged your paint
as long as you didn't push too hard and use like a 2500 2000 don't go anything below that
if you have really hard paint 1500 will work but ford paint's pretty soft so 2 to 2 500 is a good
place to start okay now let's get some alcohol again we're going to clean the area we're painting
make sure it's free of any contaminants
make sure it's nice and dry as well
now what i'm going to do is put a little piece
of tape right below the area that we're going to be doing this here
do it right you shouldn't get too much of a dirt but if you do you don't want it on the moldings
just make sure you don't touch the section you already clean there
okay i'm gonna grab your touch-up pen like any other paint i'm gonna shake it up
thoroughly before you use it so we're gonna use the pen for the smaller one just dot it first
don't worry about if it comes out a little bit
make sure it fills the entire opening so we're gonna use the brush for the second one
we actually could use the pen for both but i want to show you how to use both of them so the brush
you want to basically make sure you get a lot of the paint off of it um we live near a paint shop
they solder called micro brushes that look like q-tips but even smaller they're really good for
this but we're going to use what's included and again with this you just want to dab it
so the chip is basically a crevice in the paint so what you want to do is fill that up even over
to the edge because then we're gonna sand it smooth so after your first coat dries again five
ten minutes usually get pretty dry on this stuff you should be able to see if the paint is inside
the crevice or up to the top it's not quite at the top grab a little more touch-up paint
and put a little more in there alright so once the paint has dried get the wet sandpaper again
again sand it until it feels like it's blended in smooth
so this is the part where patience is going to come in handy you may end up doing this
two three even four times until you feel that the entire crevice is full of paint properly the chip
is full and keep sanding until again it's smooth you wanna be able to run your finger over it
you really don't wanna feel anything you might be able to tell it's there but you shouldn't be able
to actually feel the ridges if you do you have to put some more paint in and again repeat the
process put some paint in wait for it to dry hit it with some sandpaper again higher grit
2500 3000 in that neighborhood until you have a smooth surface that the paint is full and
they're ready for the next step okay once it dries now we can apply some clear coat
let that dry okay once the clear coat sets up
we're gonna use some 3000 now and again just sand it in
once you get it smooth you can dry it and then you're ready to buff it out
all right so this point it's dry what we're going to do is grab a little bit
of rubbing compound here and just start buffing it out now if you do have a buffer
you can do a much better job with the machine but if not you can do this by hand
all right then we want to wipe it off
you have to do this a couple times to get the polish to come back up
okay now we're gonna put a little bit of polish on here so we're not gonna use any camera tricks
and try to fool you guys and tell you this looks perfect you can't even tell if you get this close
to it you can still see it's touched up from a foot away though you can't even notice it
and best of all it's nice and smooth to the touch which means those chips are not going
to get any worse now this process will take some time you want to make sure you let it
dry between the wet sanding stages or you're just going to make it worse but again give yourself a
few hours to do this and with touch-up paint you make your car look a lot better than it used to
you