Car Touch Up Paint

Car touch up paint is an effective tool when it comes to your cars appearance. Assessing your problem on hand is the first step to getting this process right.

There are multiple reasons for using touch-up paint on your car.

Multiple Uses:

• Touching up front end road rash.
• Chips in paint anywhere on car.
• Scratches in paint.

Let's analyze each category and break this subject down that way, and then at the bottom, I will add some helpful "insider" tips that you might be unaware of.

Car Touch Up Paint Applicators

There are a couple of traditional paint applicators that most people are familiar with; each having its strong and weak points.

Pen Tip

• Offers precise application.
• If you can get it to work.
• An idea that seems perfect in theory.

The pen tip applicator is a newer spin to the world of touch-up paint. It is an idea that seems brilliant until you actually have to use it. The problem is its inability to maintain flow of the paint down to the tip. I found myself constantly trying to "prime" the tip to maintain any kind of usable paint. The reality is, I had better luck using the tip of a tooth pick that I simply dipped into the normal paint applicator.

Brush Tip

• Less precise application.
• Still preferred over the pen tip.
• Can be tricky to control.

The brush tip is the traditional applicator tip with car touch up paint. With this applicator, you will find yourself battling between too much paint, and not enough. Due to the flexibility of the bristles, you will also battle to maintain a straight line and consistency of the paint line you are trying to lay down.

Categories of Use

Front-end Road Rash - this will be a combination of small and large chips; damage either completely through the paint or having only creating damage in the clear coat, or top coat of paint. If you do much freeway driving, it's not long before your front end starts to look weathered. It will appear like a daunting task to try and lay a single spot of paint, within 100's of tiny damage specks of the road rash, but remember, you are looking at it up close. After you apply the car touch up paint and stand back at normal viewing distance, you will be impressed at the end result.

Simply start with the biggest chips first and work down from there until you feel it is productive. Because I find the pen tip applicator so frustrating, I typically use a tooth pick to apply to any chips that require a simple spot of paint.

Chips - When it comes to basic chips around the rest of your car, the same technique can be applied to these as you did on the front-end road rash. The areas that are most common would be on all forward facing paint areas like hood, top body rail above front windshield, side mirrors, etc. Also the lower rocker panels (If you were to split the car in half at a horizontal line, this would be the lower half; usually divided by some kind of trim or molding piece along the doors)behind each wheel. Because the tires will kick up small rocks and debris from the road, these areas are subject to more damage during driving.

Scratches - These may include longer marks from inconsiderate people taking a car key to your paint. (my experience has shown that most people who claim their car has been "keyed" by someone, it is really a scratch from some other source; like accidental) Using car touch up paint to fill these longer and deeper areas of paint damage usually becomes only a slight benefit. Typically, scratches like these as well as from other mishaps, tend to be long and thin. Because of the thickness of the brush tip applicator, it will be hard to lay a thin enough bead of paint.

The pen tip applicator will not suffice here either since you will be unable to maintain paint flow out the tip. In the professional world of car touch up paint, syringes are used to squeeze out nice, thin streams of paint. It is also diluted down to make the paint thinner so as to flow easier in these thin, long scratches.

Insider Tips

Let me close by adding some additional points for you to consider before taking on this challenge. The biggest thing we need to remember here that we are looking to improve the overall appearance of our car. Using car touch up paint is not a perfect fix, but when applied with strategy, it will improve the overall look of your car. When you start adding up all the many details of a cars appearance, it is either the neglect, or the maintenance of these details, that will combine to either improve your cars appearance, or worse, detract from your cars appearance.

• It is an accepted rule that car touch up paint will never match perfectly.
• Metallic paints will be more problematic as the tiny metallic flakes will tend to bunch up; especially when applying on vertical panels.
• You might be tempted to do nothing with chips, scratches and road rash, but most people are delighted by the overall positive affect when done.
• Depending on the thickness of the touch up paint, you will either be left with a raised touched up area, or, you will have to apply multiple coats in order to "build-up" the damaged area due to the touch-up paint being so thin.
• A permanent magic marker can also be used with decent results.
• Women's finger nail polish can also be used in a pinch.