Hey! What’s up?
In this quick video, I will talk about how to repair plastic bumper scratches quickly and easily.
When you get little bumper cover scuff on your car, like when you hit one of those yellow hydrant posts or something and you get a lot of paint on your car…most times it looks worse than what it really is.
The quick way to make it look better is to just take the paint off.
I’ve had people come to the body shop with a big scuff along the side of their car, paint all over it, looking really bad. And then I go around with some lacquer thinner and a cloth and take it all off and I go “Wow, that doesn’t look that bad.”.
What happened was, we slid in to a little pole when it was ice out. We scuffed the bumper cover out a little and took off some paint.
I will show you what you can do as a quick and easy fix without painting it.
This is kind of like a “to paint or not to paint” thing. It’s always the first stages of body repair you know. You could think about it and assess it carefully. You have to consider your time and budget. If you don’t have a lot of time or money to spend but you want to make it look better, then I’ll show you what you can do right now.
Then maybe later on, you could paint it. To paint it, you have to do this stuff anyway.
First thing you will do is get a cloth. I have a bunch of baby clothes because I have kids. Save them, don’t throw them out. 🙂
We just dabbed a little lacquer thinner on the cloth and wipe it on the scuffed area. You’ll see it will look so much better.
Now to make it even better…what you can do is buff it quickly. Wipe a little bit of compound on it and buff it out to bring the shine out.
Also, the bumper cover is dented. What we would have to do is get a heat gun, heat the dented area, push it down, scuff it up a little, put some body filler on it…that’s how to fix it correctly. Then we would do our basecoat and clearcoat and paint the whole bumper cover. You could probably blend it in the middle of the bumper cover or if you wanted to just fix all the rock chips in front of the car. Basically, blend and clearcoat the whole bumper cover. Then it will look like a brand new bumper.
But I will not worry about that right now, it’s not the purpose of this video. I just wanted to show you how to do an easy quick fix on this with some lacquer thinner.
Here’s another question that I get…
A lot of people say… “Well Tony, are you going to damage the paint with lacquer thinner?”.
Alright, you’re not going to damage paint, clear coat with lacquer thinner if you’re just putting it on the rag then wiping it off. It’s not going to do anything. The only way to damage your paint with lacquer thinner really is, to have a whole bunch of thinner on your rag put it on your car and forget all about it, right. Then you will get some bubbling effect and it will melt off all your clear coat. I’ve seen it happen.
So doing a little bit of what we did in the video is not going to hurt.
I have some silver basecoat. It’s not the exact color match but I put it on anyway just to get rid of this black scuff mark in the bottom. I want to show you how it would look a lot better by doing that alone.
So I dabbed a little bit of that silver color on and that’s pretty much it.
Like I said, you can also do full auto body work on this. Use a heat gun, push down the high area, scuff it down with some 80-grit sandpaper and finish it off with 2K primer, shaping it. We show you all that stuff step-by-step and much more inside the VIP course, if you want to learn complete auto body repair and painting.
Don’t forget to get your Free 85-page Auto Body And Paint Manual and Free 90-minute Auto Body And Paint DVD. Just help me with shipping and tell us where to send it.
This quick fix I’m showing you is just something you can do to make your car look better without doing much work and making use of what you already have lying around in your garage or shop.
You can see how much better it looks. It took out the white scuff mark with the thinner and dab of silver color concealed the tiny black mark. It’s not a perfect match but hey, you don’t see it anymore. It definitely looks a lot better.
So that’s it! Do that quick fix and you can drive around with your car right away. Of course, it would be nice if you could fix it with full auto body work and paint.
I hope you enjoyed this video. My point is, it’s not always necessary that you have to go get a whole body work job done and paint it. It literally took me 5 minutes to do the whole thing.
So let me know what you think, okay? I’m sure you have experienced this kind of bumper problem before. Did you do the same? You think you’ll be able to manage better now if something like this happens to your bumper? I’d love to hear your thoughts, guys. Put them all in the comments below.
Talk soon.
– Tony
Other Helpful Links:
Get A Free 90 Minute Auto Body DVD Here
How To Plan Your Auto Painting Project
How To Fix Scratches In Car Paint At Home
Warick Spray Gun Review (what we use to paint at LABAP)