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I have a dark gray SUV with some scratches on the plastic bumper. The black plastic bumper is exposed. I've been contemplating trying one of those scratch repair kits to make it look better. Anyone have any success with these?
Have you ever done any spray painting? If you have metallic paint, it's pretty much impossible to do a paint repair that will blend in properly with brush-on paint.
You may be better off painting that part of the bumper a low-gloss black, for example, if you are not an experienced painter.
The kind of guy who has the skill to get a decent job from a spray can almost always owns a compressor and at least one spray gun.
You can get custom-blended paint put up in aerosol cans, try to get ones with a nozzle that shoots a "fan" pattern like a real gun, rather than the round "hair spray" type pattern of most cheaper spray paints.
Larry Lyles has some good videos available, you can learn a lot. You don't want to make your first practice shoots on a car that's otherwise in good cosmetic shape though. Even if you have a lot of natural talent, it will take you a bit to learn what to do.
Good respiratory protection is a must for this sort of thing.
Re-reading your post, I'm assuming you are not looking at one of those "as seen on TV" colored wax kits, are you? I guess those can make damage less noticable for people with very bad eyesight...
I've done it with flat paints several times. With some care I can make the repair totally invisible. With metallic paint you can't make it invisible. If you are using a spray paint you can blend it in so it isn't noticeable unless you are looking for it. If you brush on metallic paint and build up enough paint to fill the scratch to a point where it is slightly higher than the original paint you can then sand down the built up paint in the scratch to make it level with the original paint and polish the area. You will still be able to see the repair, but it will look better than the scratch.
I had some tiny chips on my car door and hood edges which I touched up with a matching metallic paint in a pen. It looked pretty good, so good that you'd really have to look up close to even notice it. On the hood it was a different story. I used the paint pen on a few tiny chips from stones hitting the paint. Not so good. I'd have been better off just letting them go.
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