The grocery store parking lot is a treacherous place for your automobile’s paint. Almost everyone I know has gone to the grocery store and come out only to find that someone backing out of the parking spot next to you has left some nasty scratches in the paint. It happens to everyone. More often than not, removing scratches can be done by detailing professionals.
Scratches in the paint need not be a disaster for the paint job or your wallet. Depending how much damage the scratches have made, you can get your car looking look again without taking it to a paint or body shop to have the entire door panel painted.
Detailers Can Do Wonders Removing Scratches
We recently worked on a car that had the type of damage that is caused by a sideswipe at the grocery store. For damage like this, most of the time you don’t want to spend the money to have it fully restored. To do that, you would need to take your car to an expensive shop that specializes in body work and painting. Damage like the the damage show in the picture below can be dealt with by a professional detailing crew at a much lower cost with excellent results.
Although the damage looks significant, these scratches are actually good candidates for applying auto detailing techniques to restore the paint and make the car look, if not like new, then significantly better.
Damage Caused By Scratches
If we look at the picture we can see a couple of different types of damage. The most significant are the black streaks. They are either rubber or paint from the other car. There are some light colored scratches and some minor denting.
Detailing can either completely or significantly restore the paint, removing all the black streaks and other marks in the paint, but there will still be some imperfections from the denting. This is why Rule #1 is some important. Avoid scratches!
Okay. To undo the damage to the car in the picture, you will want to use an aggressive scratch removal product and a power buffer, most likely of the high speed rotary kind. We’ll talk more about tools in later posts. That is what we did with this car door. The image below shows the results we got.
You can see from the after picture that there was significant improvement. All the dark lines came out along with the lighter color smudging of the paint. The rough texture was taken out and the only thing left was the slight denting to the underlying aluminum.
Low Impact On Your Wallet
You can see that using auto detailing techniques to deal with this kind of car damage can bring your paint back to an excellent condition. A causal passer by would not even notice that any damage has occurred. This is the kind of low impact (to your wallet) restoration that is well done by an auto detailing crew.
If you are looking out at the driveway with some similar damage give us a call at Detail Daddy. We’ll come out and take care of it. That is our business. That is what we do.
Scratch Removal Product Aggressiveness
The various products on the market vary in their aggressiveness. Aggressiveness is a term used to describe the amount of paint that the product will remove during application. Very aggressive product like some rubbing compounds are very aggressive and will remove a substantial amount of paint during application. However, the very aggressive products are needed to repair heavily damaged paint.
Products that are referred to as cleaners are less aggressive than rubbing compounds, and polish is the least aggressive. The degree of damage to the paint should be the guide in determining the type of product to use to restore the paint.